AI article
Requests, Promises, Assertions, and Declarations: Rewriting Our AI Agent Workflow as a 1986 'Committed Speech' Machine
Community description: Why do 200-line agent prompts, Asimov's Three Laws, and sequential pre-landing checklists all fail the same way? How Fernando Flores's 1986 Committed Speech, Nuel Belnap's 1977 4-Valued Logic, and Tony Hoare's 1978 CSP turned our Makefile and init.d workflow into a self-healing Commitment Machine.
Dev.to | Oct 14, 2026 | Randal L. Schwartz
Automated excerpt
Witnessed Assertions (Performer → Customer): Nobody reported vague feelings ("Things are going well"). Verified by a physical file:line, compiler, or git log witness receipt. ! Promise (Target 20 plan) or ! Assert (Target 30/40 completion). To let users insert or move blocks of text between existing lines without immediately renumbering the entire document, TOTO used floating-point line numbers—allowing commands like move line 10 to line 4. 5, or moving lines 6 through 8 before line 4 as 3. 5, 3. 6, 3. 7—and then ran an automatic integer normalization pass to re-space the fractional line numbers back into clean integers.
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