Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-10-30. This first-party site copy preserves the text, localizes public supporting media, and connects the record to its project trail.
Original post
The Flylab almanac is the first process change I’ve made in a world that seems like it’s changing every day, how I was going about advisory hour remained largely the same-until this week.
It really started with a question: how do I keep my systems updated faster, and keep growing the site at the same time? I mean, good lord. “4” has caused me endless grief.
Anyway, as I was patching systems and watching things I realized there are certain kinds of ideas I really enjoy the site having.
The encyclopedia is one of them.
I introduced it with the Starlight Menagerie, which I wrote about previously. It’s a really great interactive encyclopedia of all the different characters. Or, I should say, all the animals and critters in the space station zoo.
I liked the encyclopedia idea so much that I took the concept and expanded Margin Aces to have an encyclopedia too.
Then it dawned on me that an encyclopedia entry would also be a really good way to test out a new process. Small enough to try, and with enough edges that I’d find out where I might run into problems.
Which is how a fly-brain soccer league ended up with forty years of history.
Two agents, one pull request
The Flylab almanac is the first entry drafted by Grok Bot.
I have Grok Bot running, and this gave me a really good sense of what it’s capable of doing. The model behind Grok Bot isn’t at the level of something like Opus5.5-to be fair, it’s the best frontier model I’ve used. But Grok Bot is pretty good, and it’s more than good enough to build out a draft of what the content could be and then structure it.
So I paired the almanac with Astra 6.1 as part of the pull request.
Grok Bot did the work and opened the pull request. Then Astra polished it up so it fit a little better. It expanded some things and made it all look a little nicer.
That workflow actually worked really well. So well that I’m experimenting with more of it.
The almanac
The almanac itself is structured around the teams in Flylab soccer. It sounds ridiculous to build a team almanac around robots piloted by a digitized flybrain, but here we are.
There are four robot clubs, each from a different corner of an old walled orchard:
Drosophila FC, from the Cider Press. The first club in the Bowl.
Real Mosca, from the Glasshouse. Founded with a crate of plums that was never theirs.
Inter Ommatidia, from the Observatory. Broke away to watch more and run less, and keeps the league’s record book.
Sporting Larva, from the Compost Rows. The youngest club.
Each club has its own page with a founding story. There are six named rivalries, and a timeline counted in Bowl Years, starting from the night four floodlights came on over the Bowl by themselves.
There’s also Mote, the little drone who has refereed every match ever played there. This character is the drone that follows Seven around adventures on my site. The drone helps Seven get unstuck in the various game projects and so it was an obvious match to have Mote unstick the ball in the soccer match.
If it isn’t clear, all of the lore is made up. Grok Bot did the initial take and then Astra expanded on it. What is fiction when the robots run on real fruit-fly wiring data, simulated in your browser? It really starts to feel like fiction is fact.
If you missed Flylab soccer, I’d encourage you to check out the article about it, or just check out the Flylab soccer section online.
For now, four robot clubs have forty years of “history”, and I have a new process to keep poking at.
See it live: The Connectome League Almanac
Play now: Fly Brain Soccer
Read more: FlyLab
Connected work
- The Connectome League Almanac: Four robot clubs, each from a different corner of an old walled orchard.
- Watch the Connectome Cup: Watch the robots play a match.
- Read the Connectome Cup story: Read the earlier article about FlyLab soccer.