Stop Telling Agents How — Dan Barrett, Raymond Weitekamp &…
Dan Barrett, Raymond Weitekamp, and Jose Montes de Oca of OpenProse discuss writing multi-agent workflows as declarative contracts in plain markdown that any harness (e.g., Claude Code, Codex) can compile and run. Topics include declaring intent instead of step-by-step prompting, agents, skills, and contracts; event-driven jobs triggered by webhooks and pull requests; benchmarking runs against contracts; a comparison with DSPy; demos including a run.prose.md walkthrough, a 'grumpy senior' PR reviewer, and an end-to-end bank model-documentation workflow; and composing contracts plus pinning a winning run into a reusable workflow. Q&A included.
# Video Identity Observations
## Video Overview
- **Title:** "Stop Telling Agents How — Dan Barrett, Raymond Weitekamp & Jose Montes de Oca, OpenProse"
- **Format:** Conference talk with live demos and audience Q&A
- **Subject:** OpenProse, described as "a language, it's a framework" for declarative multi-agent workflows built entirely in markdown
## Explicit Self-Description Evidence
- **Identity of presenters:** "My name is Dan. I am the creator of Open Pros... I'm joined by Raymond and Jose two fabulous teammates, co-workers, just phenomenal creators and engineers."
- **Credentials offered:** Dan: "I am a software engineer of 12 years"; claims he was "named the best prompter in the Eleuther AI back rooms Discord" in 2021. Jose: "early Google Cloud." Raymond: "a PhD and two-time founder."
- **Product framing:** "It's just markdown... it's a programming language for agents"; "It's event driven. It's not chat."
- **Openness claims:** "It's open source, you can run it locally with NPX skills"; "We publish this open open core. It has a permissive license"; "you can run it on prem."
- **Positioning vs. other tools:** "We're like... a meta harness... We want you to bring your own harness"; comparisons drawn to DSPy ("similar... intent... the implementation is the exact opposite") and Anthropic's dynamic agent workflows.
## Intended Audience (Observed)
The speakers explicitly polled and segmented the room into three audiences:
- "How many people in here are from the finance side of things?"
- "How many are like AI engineers or developers?"
- "How many people... are maybe more like PMs or like professionals but... you're using AI but you don't know how to code?"
Tailored value propositions per segment:
- **Finance/regulated industries:** "We don't need the procurement department, we don't need the IT department... without deploying anything to you other than some markdown files."
- **Non-coders:** "If you can read logical English, you can read Open Prose."
- **Engineers:** Express "very complex multi-agent workflows... in just our markdown contract."
A live quant-model-documentation demo targets banking customers, with claims like "a problem that is worth anywhere between 10 to 50 million dollars a year for some of these bigger banks."
## Claimed Scope
- **Core thesis:** "We want to write our prompts declaratively... We want to tell it what to do, not how to do it."
- **Use-case boundary (creator-stated):** "You don't want to use this if you're doing a one-off... What this is good for is something you need to do a lot. It needs to be reliable, it has to be repeatable, it needs to be auditable."
- **Fit acknowledgment (creator-stated limitation):** "I don't know that OpenProse is the best place if you're at that stage... where you really don't even know the shape of what you're talking about."
## Demonstrated (vs. Claimed)
- Live demos shown: agent-authored PR-review program, GitHub webhook jobs, quant model documentation generation in Codex.
- Usage pattern observation: "More of our users are using Open Prose to do ops and product management and... quant model documentation" than software engineering.
- Future-oriented claims explicitly flagged as not built: "We're not doing that right now" (RL/finetuning); Jev/decision-model integration: "we're still building that part in."
## Notes for Synthesis
- This is a single event talk, not a channel output; audience and scope evidence here reflects this presentation only.
- Bold quantitative claims (e.g., "$10–50M a year," "~80,000 token system prompt," "dozens of PRs in days") are creator assertions, not independently verified.
# Delivery Observation — "Stop Telling Agents How" (OpenProse)
## Speakers & Turn Structure
Three presenters with distinct observable roles:
- **Dan Barrett** — opens, frames the thesis, closes; handles conceptual questions.
- **Raymond Weitekamp** — product demo lead; talks through live app usage.
- **Jose Montes de Oca** — speaks briefly (e.g., handling a Q&A answer about pinning the "how"); mostly present but lightly featured in this transcript.
The format is deliberately interactive: Dan explicitly invites interruption — *"We'll we'll we'll open it up to questions throughout. So, and please do raise uh your hand if you have questions, interject, please."*
## Recurring Verbal Habits
### Repetition-for-emphasis (stuttered restatement)
Very frequent across all speakers, used to hammer key terms:
- *"We want to compose composition over inheritance. We want to write our prompts declaratively rather than procedurally or imperatively."*
- *"It's all just English. It's all just language."*
- *"it's it's all text and we're doing these event-driven multi-agent workflows"*
- *"we'll come we'll come we'll come find you afterwards"*
### Signature framing phrases
- **"the thing"** — Dan's recurring placeholder for the agent/model: *"communicate our intent to the thing"*; *"no matter how smart the thing gets"*.
- **"what vs. how"** — the central recurring contrast: *"We want to tell it what what to do, not how to do it."* Echoed by Jose: *"the what and the how being two two different two different ideas."*
- **"contract"** — heavily repeated noun: *"We think of that as a contract"*, *"a job is a contract plus a trigger"*, *"benchmark against this contract."*
- **"you are the compiler"** — quoted twice as a favorite line: *"'You are the compiler.' This is not an analogy. You are the compiler."*
### Named "-ification" coinages (playful jargon)
- *"the great Jeff-ification is upon us"*
- *"the great jobification"*
- *"spectrum driven development"* (jokingly self-named)
These appear in Q&A riffing, suggesting an improvised, banter-heavy style between the three.
## Teaching Habits
### Audience segmentation
Raymond explicitly polls the room and tailors pitches per group:
- *"How many people in here are from the the finance side of things?... How many are like AI engineers or developers?... PMs or like professionals..."*
- Then: *"I've got why should I care for those three audiences."*
### "Two things to remember" compression
Raymond opens his section with explicit retention framing: *"if there's only two things that you remember, the two things that I want you to remember are it's just markdown"* and *"it's event driven. It's not chat."* He repeats: *"if you only remember two things about us, that's it."*
### Historical progression narrative
Dan teaches via a timeline of abstraction layers: prompting → *"context engineering"* → harness building → *"self-modifying harness topology"* — culminating in *"what's kind of the next step here?"*
### Analogy anchored in classical software engineering
- *"composition over inheritance"*
- Kernel as *"a bootloader or a resolution path, a an index uh system"*
- Jose: React-style *"memoization"* analogy for dependency triggers; *"semantic classifier or semantic memoizer, which you could think of it as like a cache."*
## Communication Patterns
### Mock self-deprecation and asides
- Dan on credentials: *"I was named the best prompter in the Eleuther AI back rooms Discord"* (delivered as a joke about obsolete skills).
- On Raymond: *"He told me to introduce himself as a as a vibe code extraordinaire, but that's way underselling his his talents."*
- Raymond: *"if you run into any issues, don't tell my boss, you just send it straight to me."*
### Rapid collaborative handoffs in Q&A
Answers are co-constructed in real time:
- *"It's a great question. Uh, I'll field this."* → *"Yeah, you should take that."*
- *"Sorry, Raymond."* / *"we're going a lot off script, but it's a great question"*
### Explicit consent/transactions in the demo
Raymond narrates safety behavior while demoing: *"anything that can charge money or spend money, you have to confirm. I think that's like a best practice."*
### Hedged claims about product maturity
Frequent explicit honesty about limitations:
- *"we're not doing that right now"*, *"it's coming"*, *"we're still working we're still building that part in"*
- *"I'm not a quant, but"* — deferring on domain expertise.
## Stability Assessment
**Stable-looking patterns** (multiple instances): the what/how dichotomy, "contract" as core vocabulary, stuttered emphasis repetition, the two-point retention framing, audience segmentation, collaborative Q&A handoffs, and playful coined jargon.
**Isolated moments** (insufficient repetition to call patterns): the Matt Pocock trolling anecdote, the "grumpy senior developer" demo prompt, and the "boil the frog" expectation metaphor appear once each. Jose's personal speaking style is hard to characterize from this transcript given his limited turns.
**Uncertainty note**: filler density ("uh," "like") is high throughout, but transcript conventions may exaggerate this; no inference is drawn from it beyond noting informality of register.
# Position Record: "Stop Telling Agents How" — OpenProse Talk
**Video:** 01a15ca6-683d-71cf-98d5-722622f7e3b3
**Speakers identified in transcript:** Dan Barrett (self-identified as creator of OpenProse), Raymond Weitekamp (introduced by Dan; self-identifies as maintainer of run.pros.md), Jose Montes de Oca (mentioned only in Dan's introduction; no attributed direct quotes), plus unidentified audience questioners.
---
## Dan Barrett's Positions
### Prompting as an enduring, evolving skill
- Self-describes as "best prompter in the Eleuther AI back rooms Discord" in April 2021, and claims that skill's useful lifetime was "around like two or three years."
- Argues one thing **has not changed**: communicating intent to the model — "how do I get out of my brain the thing that I want."
### Abstraction history of AI work
- Claims a progression: next-token prompting → hand-filled context / RAG ("context engineering") → harnesses stuffing context for you → most recently (last "8–10 months") papers pushing abstraction up another layer, with harnesses themselves changing.
- Cites Anthropic's same-day presentation on "flows" as a "self-modifying harness topology."
### Declarative, compositional prompting (core thesis)
- Advocates **composition over inheritance** and **declarative over imperative** prompting: "tell it what to do, not how to do it."
- Reasoning: specifying *how* leaves "cost and intelligence on the table" — a more intelligent model can figure out the how; prescribing it reduces the model to a cheaper model's capability.
- Frames the declared outcome/goal as a **contract**.
- Treats language as "a really powerful force of creation" — literally, since "you can write a sentence and the things just make that sentence true."
### On-premise / enterprise positioning
- Emphasizes OpenProse runs on prem, on open models, "bring your own harness," harness-agnostic.
- Claims the key enterprise asset to protect is not data but **institutional operational knowledge** ("standard operating procedures") — "you don't want to be shipping your standard operating procedure out to the big labs."
- Says OpenProse is published open core with a permissive license.
### Quant-model documentation use case
- Describes a customer workflow for documenting quant models, which must be re-documented periodically for regulators.
- Claims a big bank has ~4,000 models needing yearly re-documentation, a problem "worth anywhere between 10 to 50 million dollars a year," and that OpenProse does it "shockingly good... for much cheaper."
- **Qualification he states explicitly:** getting outputs through compliance, auditors, and regulators "is another part of the battle."
- Notes the model documented in the demo (Sofa curve) is public; no internal bank data shown.
### When OpenProse is *not* appropriate
- "You don't want to use this if... you're doing a one-off" or in exploratory mode — chat is better there.
- Suited for workflows that need to be "reliable... repeatable... auditable."
- Concedes there is an "implicit like you do know what you need" as a prerequisite.
### Composition details
- Prefers the term **composition** over inheritance; describes injecting multiple contracts into one run.
- Describes a React-style memoization analogy for event-driven dependency propagation, where a decision model could act as a "semantic classifier or semantic memoizer" — with the caveat: "we're still building that part in."
- Says contract composition lets you partially "declare the how" via intermediary contracts (checkpoints) while leaving agents flexible within each step.
- On the kernel's design basis: derived from his engineering experience with people expressing requirements, plus internal benchmarking using "an evolutionary algorithm where we can shrink the kernel."
---
## Raymond Weitekamp's Positions
### Two defining characteristics
- Wants the audience to remember only two things: **it's just markdown** (one giant prompt; also calls it a programming language/framework) and **it's event-driven, not chat**.
### Audience-specific value claims
- **Regulated industries:** since it's all text, no procurement/IT deployment needed; "we don't need the procurement department, we don't need the IT department" — multi-agent workflows delivered "other than some markdown files."
- **Non-coders:** "if you can read logical English, you can read OpenProse"; programs are meant to be read and edited by people, not hand-written; the program becomes a reusable workflow.
- **AI engineers/developers:** even the compiler/virtual machine is "just a giant prompt" — "you're literally incepting Codex into compiling the program for you."
### Jobs and triggers
- Defines a **job as "a contract plus a trigger."** Implemented triggers: webhooks (which "cover a lot" — Slack, GitHub) and cron jobs.
- Describes self-development workflow: GitHub issues spawn Prose programs attempting to resolve them (input: issue; output: a commit); PR events trigger "event-driven kind of adversarial review."
### On self-review bias
- Endorses Anthropic's point that a model checking its own work is biased — "so are humans."
- (Attribution note: Dan completes this thread, arguing fresh sessions benchmarked against a contract break the "self-confidence loop.")
### Comparison to DSPy (notable qualification)
- Says the **intent** behind OpenProse is similar to DSPy (an abstraction layer over complex workflows) but the **implementation is "the exact opposite"**: DSPy isolates every LLM call behind deterministic typed code; OpenProse lets "everything be in fuzzy land" because "AI is getting smart enough to be the compiler."
- **Weakness Raymond himself names:** "you are letting the agent say, 'I have met the contract'"; results differ between models ("if you run it on Haiku or... Fable you're going to get a very different result").
### Decision models ("Jeff") and RL
- Agrees decision models fit as "a verifier on the end of the job — very, very fast and cheap," and as a **router** for event triage.
- Claims the OpenProse language itself "does not have any place in the Jeff land because they're not generative."
- On RL: "the fact that it's all text is like perfect and beautiful for RL" — but **explicitly qualifies**: "we're not doing that right now," only discussing with prospects. Adds they haven't hit volumes where it matters.
### Reliability and non-determinism caveats
- Notes "these things are non-deterministic" and suggests some "pinned and stable" endpoints people show "actually are changing as all these companies are compute constrained."
- Describes expectation drift: users "boil the frog" and lose the magic of a great first session; codifying a golden session is a mitigation.
### Transparency about scale
- Reveals the skill/system prompt is "close to 70,000 tokens, 80,000 tokens"; Dan corrects it's "longer." Raymond: "we're trying to clean it up... now that the agents are smarter we can make it a little bit shorter."
- Says markdown is "the tip of the iceberg" — a full type system overriding markdown underneath.
### Boundary: not a harness
- "We're like... a meta harness... We want to be this thing that is compiled by the harness. We don't want to be the harness." Explicitly avoids coupling to Claude Code's sub-agent system since Codex differs.
### Workflow templating claim
- Argues you can "template the shape of the multi-agent workflow with no code" — fan-out/fan-in, map-reduce, adversarial review, loop-until-condition — referencing Anthropic's dynamic workflow blog post's taxonomy.
- States a requirement: harnesses need **sub-agents**; also says bash isn't strictly needed (VM isolates possible). Notes plain "pie" (as transcribed) lacks sub-agents.
---
## Interactive Exchanges (attributed dialogues)
### Pinning the "how" (Dan, answering an audience question)
- Acknowledges a spectrum between what and how; OpenProse has syntax to **pin the how**: run an expensive model, capture its trace, then "shrink wrap" it into a fixed procedure to drive down cost. Dan: "when we say it's all markdown, that's where you can start, but then you can move your way to more specific procedural imperative style instructions."
### RL question (multiple speakers)
- Audience question: "why wouldn't you just RL this?" Responses qualify intent: all-text representation is RL-friendly, but not currently implemented.
### Chat limitation (Raymond)
- Argues chat's success is partly because "you do not need to know anything about what you're looking for." Compares to his DSPy joke: "Oh, no, I have to know what I want now."
- Claims "chat isn't a great interface and agents that are RL'd to be convincing chat partners are not necessarily the best type of AI for workflows that don't have human conversation as part of them."
---
## Unresolved Tensions Preserved
- **Declarative purity vs. pinned how:** Dan's core message is "stop telling agents how," yet a demonstrated feature lets users codify an imperative how for cost savings — presented as a spectrum, not a contradiction, but the tension is explicit.
- **"The agent says it's done":** Raymond flags the lack of independent verification as OpenProse's core weakness; the adversarial PR-review workflow and future decision-model verifiers are proposed (partial) mitigations.
- **Non-determinism vs. reliability claims:** Raymond acknowledges non-determinism and model-dependent outputs while also marketing OpenProse for "reliable, repeatable" workflows.
- **Quant documentation ROI figures** (10–50M/year, "shockingly good") are stated without benchmark details beyond references to historical comparison and on-floor quant ratings.
- **Decision-model and RL integrations** are aspirational: "it's coming," "we're still building that part in," "we're not doing that right now."
# Speaker & Provenance Record
## Video Metadata
- **Title:** Stop Telling Agents How — Dan Barrett, Raymond Weitekamp & Jose Montes de Oca, OpenProse
- **Format:** Conference/workshop talk with live Q&A and demos
## Identified Speakers & Roles
| Speaker | Role (explicit in source) |
|---|---|
| **Dan Barrett** | Creator of OpenProse; software engineer of 12 years; lead presenter |
| **Raymond Weitekamp** | Teammate/co-worker; self-described "vibe code extraordinaire" (per Dan); PhD and two-time founder; builder of the hosted version **run.pros.md** ("I'm in charge of run.pros.md") |
| **Jose Montes de Oca** | Teammate/co-worker; "early Google Cloud"; introduced but does not speak in the transcript |
| **Audience members** | Unnamed questioners during Q&A (unidentified by name or role) |
> Note: Dan explicitly introduces Raymond and Jose as "two fabulous teammates, co-workers... phenomenal creators and engineers."
## Speaker Attribution Map
- **Opening framing, declarative-contract thesis, quant model documentation demo:** Dan Barrett
- **Framework explanation ("just markdown," "event-driven"), hosted app demo, chat agent walkthrough:** Raymond Weitekamp
- **Interruptions/corrections during Q&A and the "meta harness" clarification:** both Dan and Raymond (alternating; exact boundaries partially inferable from turn markers)
## Referenced Sources & Third-Party Claims
Claims below are attributed as stated in the transcript, not verified:
- **Eleuther AI back rooms Discord** — Dan claims he was "named the best prompter" there in April 2021
- **Anthropic** — referenced morning presentation on "flows" / self-modifying harness topology and dynamic agent workflows blog post ("six types")
- **DSPy** — Raymond describes himself as "a very old-school DSPy user"; compares OpenProse intent to DSPy but implementation as its "exact opposite"
- **Exa** — Raymond's preferred search skill ("faster and cheaper for me")
- **Jeff / "Jev" decision models** — audience question and discussion of one-shot classifiers as verifiers/routers
- **Matt Pocock** — spec/workflow reference; Raymond built an "auto Pocock" troll variant
- **Tools/platforms named:** Claude Code, Codex, GitHub, Slack, Stripe (hypothetical), OpenAI models ("top three"), NPX, Notion, Jira, React-style memoization, Fable, Haku (as transcribed)
- **Business claims (unverified):** quant model documentation worth "$10 to 50 million a year" for large banks; "a big bank has 4,000 or so models"; kernel/system prompt is "close to 70,000, 80,000 tokens"; "a number of big companies" already using it in-house
## Promotional Segments (flagged)
- **Product promotion:** OpenProse framework throughout; hosted app **run.pros.md** (QR code shared); open-source install via `NPX skills add open prose prose`
- **Hosted-service pitch:** Raymond offering direct support ("don't tell my boss, you just send it straight to me")
- **Enterprise/consulting pitch:** on-prem deployment, customer engagement for quant model documentation, invitation to contact about RL/trillion-token use cases ("if someone wants to do a trillion tokens in Open Pros, we'll happily just — it for you")
- **Community/feedback solicitation:** requests for feature feedback on triggers
## Availability & Access Limits
- No transcript-provided information on comments, curated show notes, or cited-link availability
- Demo shown live; kernel described as "published publicly" and downloadable — exact link not transcribed beyond the run.pros.md mention
- Customer examples anonymized; no internal bank data shown (per speakers), using public "sofa curve" model
- **Uncertainty note:** transcript is auto-formatted with `>>` markers; speaker turns during rapid Q&A exchanges are not always cleanly attributable to a named individual
\>\> My name is Dan. I am the creator of Open Pros. This year is Raymond I'm joined by Raymond and Jose two fabulous teammates, co-workers,
just phenomenal creators and engineers all around. I'll introduce them a little bit in a bit. Uh just a little bit of background about what we're what we're about to show you here. Uh 5 years ago in April of 2021, I was named the best prompter in the Eleuther AI back rooms Discord, which was a skill at the time that I thought would be tremendously valuable for many years afterward and actually it lasted I think around like two or three years maybe was the lifetime of of that skill. And I say that because a lot obviously, as you all know, has changed in the last 5 years. But one thing has not changed and I've been to a lot of workshops today. We've got a lot of amazing talks coming up. But the one thing that seems to be ever present in in all of the work that we do and and that actually doesn't change with the latest harness or the latest model is we all still need to communicate our intent to the thing and no matter how smart the thing gets, there is still this challenge of how do I get out of my brain the thing that I want and and get it into the super intelligence that is just going to carry it away and and do everything for me. Uh Open Pros is is a is a language, it's a framework, it's a started as a project based on my own love of language and my own strong belief that language is this really powerful force of creation and I mean that like I know that's a little bit cliche, but that's like in the very literal sense now with with the capabilities that we have. You can write a sentence and the things just make that sentence true. And so the question then becomes like what is the sentence that you write now that you have this tremendously powerful machine to make it true. And the skill of prompting from 5 years ago looks very different from the skill of what we like
to think of as contract creation or contract composition today. And when you were dealing with a model that was just completing the the next token, there was there was good
patterns and bad patterns for for prompting. A few years later, you were filling out context by hand and you were taking rag results and and tool calls and stuff and search results and stuffing them into into the context window and you call that context engineering. And then the harness started doing that for you and you were building a harness and and and you were you were you thought of the harness as this this machine that was stuffing context for you. And and in the last 8 10 months, we've seen a number of papers come out that is just pushing everything up another layer of abstraction and and the harnesses themselves are are changing out from under you. We saw a great presentation by Anthropic this morning on on flows and that's this idea of this like self-modifying harness topology that is managing sub agents in a way that just was not thinkable even just a year ago. So, if if is solved and the context is now solved and now the harnesses are now solved, like what's kind of the next step here? And that's what we'd like to talk a little bit about today and show you some of the stuff we've been we've been building in in support of that. I like to think of it as as once you can name the thing that you want, any harness can self-shape, can fan out, do any sort of loop to get you there. And the question is what are the good best practices for naming the thing that you want. And and we think of that as as declarative. We're we're going to borrow concepts from classical software engineering. I'm a software engineer of 12 years. Jose and Raymond have been around the block with this as well. Jose was early Google Cloud and he's informed a number of the ways we think about this. Raymond is just a phenomenal
uh uh He told me to He told me to introduce himself as a as a vibe code extraordinaire, but that's way underselling his his talents. He's a PhD and two-time founder and has been doing
harness engineering for basically as long as anybody I know. Um and and so so it's this idea of borrowing old engineering patterns and applying them into this new world. We want to write our prompts compositionally. We want to compose composition over inheritance. We want to write our prompts declaratively rather than procedurally or imperatively. We want to tell it what what to do, not how to do it because the harness in its infinite wisdom and its infinite intelligence is going to figure that out. And if we tell it how to do the thing, now we're actually leaving cost and and intelligence on the table because we could run it for a cheaper model. A more intelligent model can figure out how to do the thing. So it's this idea of write what you want, declare what you want, the outcome, the goal, the end state. We think of that as a contract. And and write it in a way such that you can compose these because when you build a system, when when you build an open framework like this, when you build a system that has many parts, maybe across your company or across your team, you want to do things in a way that allows things to elegantly compose and that lets you manage complexity in in a in a more local way. Um with that, I'm going to hand it over to Raymond who's going to tell you a little bit about how it works and then we're
going to show you some some demos after that. We'll we'll we'll open it up to questions throughout. So, and please do raise uh your hand if you have questions, interject, please.
\>\> Awesome. Thank you, Dan. Okay, so there um I wanted to just help you understand Open Pros and put it in a quadrant. Um so, if there's only two things that you remember, the two things that I want you to remember are it's just markdown. So, we like to sometimes call it it's a programming language for agents. We sometimes call it a framework, but all of it is just text. It's just one giant prompt. Um and then the second thing to just help you figure out in your mental bucket where this fits is it's event driven. It's not chat. We're not chatting with these things. Um I'll chat with an agent that will make Open Pros programs later, but if you only remember two things about us, that's it. It's it's all text and we're doing these event-driven multi-agent workflows, not chatting. Um you can it's open source, you can run it locally with NPX skills. Uh I'll walk through the hosted version that I've built uh run.pros.md, and uh we also will do it for you. If you want to reach out, uh we'll help you out. So, uh I guess quick question, like how many people in here are from the the finance side of things? Okay, that's good. How many are like AI engineers or developers? Okay. Then how many people um are maybe more like PMs or like professionals but and you're using AI but you don't know how to code? Okay, fewer but Okay, good. So, I've got why should I care for those three audiences? So, for the small regulated industries, one of the things that we've seen um some banks and uh other financial services companies be excited about is like what I said before, it's all text. So, we don't need the procurement department, we don't need the IT department. You can use whatever coding agent you want, whatever inference you want, whatever guardrails you already have, whatever stack you have, we can actually like help you um you know, create these multi-agent workflows without deploying anything to you other than some markdown files. Um so, that's one of the the angles or or benefits of it being all text. Um for the folks that are uh not writing code themselves, uh basically, if you can read logical English, you can read Open Prose. So, we're going to very specifically not get into the syntax of the language. Technically, it is a programming language and it has a syntax, um but it's really meant to be more um read by people and edited by people rather than like handwritten from scratch by people. Like you we don't want users concerned with like learning the schema. And so, you can kind of describe the work, have your agent write the Prose program, you know, that might give you some more ideas for how you might want to edit it, or you might see something you want to change, uh and then that Prose program becomes the reusable workflow. Um and then for the AI engineers and the developers, uh I think the angle where you might want to use this is it's you know, it's not it's a framework that's not a framework, and we'll talk a little bit about that in a second, but even the compiler for the framework, even the virtual machine for the framework, is itself just a giant prompt, and you're literally like incepting cod code into compiling the program for you, incepting Codex into doing that. Uh so, there's uh you can express very, very complex multi-agent workflows that uh things like the Anthropic um uh dynamic What do they call them? Dynamic agent workflows um would probably be like an analogy. You can do that in any coding agent in just our markdown contract. Uh okay. So, first on this idea that it's just markdown, um this can be a complete program, just as an example. And again, I don't want to get uh so hung up in the syntax, um but you can basically say, "Hey, here's the goal and like here is the the contract that that the that this maintains. Like here's the definition of what this contract maintains." Um and again, that's just like a very silly simple one. Um the uh this idea here of like, well, what is it that you can declare? So, again, I don't
want to get into the schema and the types and the syntax, but what you or your agent can declare on behalf of you with uh in the CLI is called the pros write function. In our app, it's
basically just the agent that drives the whole app for you. You can make sub agents. Uh you can assign specific skills uh to those specific sub agents. You can have specific tools that are available. So, for example, for search, I love Exa. I think they're amazing and I don't want it doing regular web search. I always want it using Exa cuz it's faster and cheaper for me. You can say, "Here's the skill for that. Here's the CLI for that." If you can't find those things, just don't run the program. Like we're not doing it the other way. So, you might have skills that are specific to your company or to your org. And then essentially, you can think of it as like wiring that program together and like if it doesn't have all the dependencies, like do not compile, right? Um and then obviously that what are the inputs of this program, what are the outputs that this uh program has to deliver, this contract has to deliver. Um and again, like again, this could be something if people want to nerd out and ask Dan about how he built it. Like the runtime itself is just a giant prompt, too. So, um you know, some of my favorite sentences in the uh in the skill or the prompt is like "You are the compiler." This is not an analogy. You are the compiler. And uh it seems to work. Um So, uh yeah, and then this idea of a event-driven. So, we want to get out of this idea that everything is a conversation, that everything is a chat, um and build event-driven systems. So, um again, like uh just to compare these different workflow trees, it's like something something happens that might be just like a cron job on a schedule, that might be a new issue is opened in GitHub, or a new PR uh is filed, or you have some webhook system, right? Um that you're I don't know, Stripe isn't working, whatever, then you can now um you know, trigger that workflow that you've expressed uh to go handle that entire thing end to end and deliver on the contract. Um and so, this idea of like starting to
build towards jobs, so you can set this up yourself with your own agents in your own system, and what I built um in run.prose.md is um this idea of like a job is a
contract plus a trigger. So, again, the the trigger can be something super trivial like a schedule, and so here I'm basically saying like, "Okay, every day uh run this." Um but uh right now, the two the two main triggers that we have implemented in the app as is are um our webhooks, which really uh inevitably cover a lot of different things, like a whole Slack app is just webhooks, GitHub just webhooks. Um and cron jobs. We're happy to add more if you want to give us feedback on ones that we can make easier for you. Um and again, from from that trigger, then you triage uh these workflows. So, uh you can start to build out these, you know, code factories from um creating these standing jobs um of the Prose programs. Uh what I want to show and I'll get towards in a second is um one of the things that I've been building to make sure that's ready in time for this event is um is webhooks and using uh GitHub uh events specifically, and I've been forcing myself to use the program to develop the program. And so, one of the examples that we now have in the issue in the system is, well, there's two different main ones. One is like any GitHub issue that comes in, you write a prose program for how it's going to try to address the issue. So, you can make that as complex or as simple as you want. You can run it could be a multi-agent workflow. It could have specific, um, skills that it has to follow or use models. Um, and so, basically the input is whatever that issue was, the output is a commit. And it has to go all the way to getting that thing done for you. Uh, and then similarly, uh, and I'll show this one more specifically is like doing it with, uh, PR reviews. So, you can do
this event-driven kind of adversarial review. And I don't know if you guys heard, um, in one of the things I thought was interesting this morning in the Anthropic workshop where they're talking about um, the challenges with
self-review. So, like, you're you're in Claude Code and you're like, "All right. Here, I'm going to let you push to production, but just could you just check like one more time for me?" And like, it's it's biased to, you know, think that it did a good job. And so, so are humans, right? And so, um, I'll show a workflow where essentially the agents that are building this get this backpressure from the app itself um, through through pull requests. Um, okay. So, while we transition to this, are there any questions now while we switch over to the to the web app? \>\> Please, no question is too silly. Is that a hand or a phone? I can't see the lights here. \>\> Maybe none. \>\> Yeah, go ahead. \>\> One over there. \>\> \[clears throat\] \>\> It's a great question. Uh, I'll field this. \>\> Yeah, you should take that. \>\> Yeah. Uh, so, we actually have this idea of earlier I alluded to the what and the how being two two different two different ideas. Declare the outcome and then the how is a little bit you you leave it open, let the agent figure it out. On that spectrum, you actually do, to your point, at at certain places want to weigh in on the how. And in fact, we have a a feature a syntax that lets you pin the how. And so you can initially declare it very loose. You can let a very intelligent agent run and figure out how to get to the thing that you've declared. And then once it does that, you can say here's the agent trace. Let's take this trace and we will sort of codify it or or I don't know, shrink wrap it into a how. And what that allows us to do is actually drive down the the the cost of completing the workflow. So you you start with a very expensive model, figures it out, and then you sort of, as
you say, make it more specific, more deterministic. So you're kind of like shifting the the the the the spectrum from totally at just a what to to how how to
do it. And and the cost comes down as you do that. So when we say it's all markdown, that's where you can start it, but then you can move your way to to uh more specific procedural imperative style instructions as well. \>\> Yeah, I guess a couple comments on that. So one, we do have a system where you can take like a golden session and like the like say make this into a reusable workflow. Like that was the best cloud code session I've ever had. Like I wanted to do cuz that's this is we get this all the time, right? And I think there's there's a part of it where like these things are non-deterministic. I think a lot of the quote-unquote pinned and stable endpoints people have shown actually are changing as all these companies are compute constrained, but I also just think there's this like changing expectations thing, right? Which is like the first time you tried like whatever it was, like Fable or whatever, like blew your blew your mind and you're like, I want whatever. This workflow is so amazing. I want this every time. And then you kind of like boil the frog and like have just different expectations and all of a sudden doesn't happen again and like some of that is just reliability. And so so one thing you can do is like take a really good session and like codify it. But then the other thing, just to give Dan a little bit more credit of like building the framework is like it's not just literally like the markdowns you see are like the tip of the iceberg of what it's seeing. So like the last time I checked the full like system prompt or skill or
however you there's I mean it is a skill it is a system prompt is like close to 70,000 tokens, 80,000 tokens of like \>\> longer. We're trying to clean it up. We're trying to
\>\> Yeah, well now that the agents are smarter we can make it a little bit shorter. But we basically have this full type system that's like we're overriding markdown with a very very clear type system and a very specific prompt for how the agent is going to deliver this incredibly complex multi-agent um product on the out um but maybe to be explicit about where we don't mess with it is like um So like Claude code when it runs it it has its own system for sub-agents. We don't want to mess with that. We don't want where we don't want our prompt to be um in any way like specific to Claude code cuz Codex has a totally different like set of sub-agents. So the the we're like I don't know, a meta harness, like \>\> \[laughter\] \>\> whatever. We're one layer we want you to bring your own harness. We don't want to be the harness. We want to be this uh thing that is compiled by the harness. So I guess that's a couple pieces of \>\> Does that answer your question?
\>\> um All right. So if you want to try it, it's um it's here the QR code run.prose.md uh the QR code goes to that. If you want to start playing around with it. Um what I want to do
in um showcasing this is to uh show off a couple of things. So, the um the first thing is that um the So, this is the This is a Prose program in the edit mode, right? It is technically Markdown and Dan's overridden like the H3 headers with all the types of this thing. But, getting someone to like learn that syntax and write it from scratch, it's kind of a not really the point. Um and so, what we um what we want to do is So, even though everything that executes this program is here, and in fact, I've for the real nerds in the audience, you can see that I've over I've taken the front matter of the Markdown file, and that is actually all of the stuff that's happening in the cloud. So, I could take this program and export it as a pure Markdown file and go send it to my friend, and they'll it'll upload in their cloud this the exact same way um to keep it like composable and keep it true to that idea of that we're pure Markdown. Um anyways, the whole idea is like even though that is the thing and we'd want you to be reading this thing, it's not like the entry point. So, what I've built instead is um an agent which hopefully will talk to me here. \>\> Hi, it's Prose. What are you hoping to get done today? \>\> Okay, so uh every time I have a new pull request, I want you to um write me a Prose program in my run-prose repo that will review it as if you are a a grumpy senior developer who doesn't like
AI-generated code. \>\> Sure, I can do that. Hang on. \>\> Okay. So, I'm going to mute myself. So, it's it's talking. It's going to try
to figure this out. And the the whole idea is like anything So, anything that can charge money or spend money, you have to confirm. I think that's like a best practice. Um Oh, yeah. Great. So, I had to confirm cuz that that action costs money for it to So, that's the pros rate function. So, it basically takes my query and is going to generate a new program um from that including all the wiring. This step is going to take a little bit longer. So, while that's running, I'll show like the manual way of doing that. Which is in the jobs tab. I don't know why this is cutting out. Um in the jobs tab, we can go here, make a new job. The the uh on a schedule is just a cron job. We have a a web hook that's open-ended. So, like you can have yourself or your agent um either use our specific web hook or like wire our thing to listen to your web hook. But for Git GitHub, um so, I'll do the same one. So, for GitHub pull requests, we make that easy. Um we're going to do it in the run.pros. We're going to uh I've just pre-wired this contract. It's like, "Okay, you're going to review my thing." And then I can pick, you know, what uh model that they have. We'll we'll add more uh later. Right now, we have the the like top three from uh OpenAI. Uh and then I would just uh create that and deploy that. So, then the other thing while this um
this one's working that I want to show is how I've actually been using that as back pressure. So, the main thing Don't get too hung up on the um whatever, the content up here. But the
thing that I want to show you here is like the the the volume. So, like in whatever that is, like this entire thing is goes back to 3 days ago, but then if I go here, like these are all still from 3 days ago or 4 days ago. Or so, like in the span of a few days, this is doing like dozens and dozens and dozens of PRs, and every time I'm asking for a new feature about this GitHub was webhooks feature that I wanted to have ready for this event, uh every single one of those is firing off like a series of review agents where it's like so some of them are simple like okay, this one clearly seems to have worked right away. So, there's only one round. Uh some of these had, you know, 14 rounds of review before uh it felt like the reviewer agents were like aligned and it let this thing pass. Um and even just today, like I noticed something that I didn't love about um how it was doing it, and I was able to um you know, basically say okay, um on our staging server, you know, don't mess with production. I'm about to give a talk. On the staging server, I want you to like change the things the exact ways in which this will get triggered, but you have to use the system yourself. So, um like both our dev version of this and our prod version of this are giving different reviews. Um and now the agent that's running uh here, uh which we can see all the different jobs in the the runs tab here, essentially like cannot consider its job to be complete until it's like um a a like um like my developer agents have like have to take that feedback into account. \>\> And just to emphasize like what's different about something like this from any other chat-based or or agent-based flow that you've seen is all of these
are getting compared against a contract. So, you could think of it as a fresh session every time is getting benchmarked against this contract that you've written declaratively, which as as Raymond alluded to earlier, gets the
models out of this like self-confidence loop where you don't want the same model checking the thing that was done. So, you're spawning new sessions and and bouncing them off of a contract, which is I just a better uh pattern for for how to do it. Yeah, go ahead. \>\> Yeah. \>\> But, doesn't \[clears throat\] it seem like a great opportunity for one-shot classifiers like Jeff? \>\> Yeah. So, they um \>\> We have a lot of good stuff in the pipe. So, so the idea of checking against a contract and and verifying it. Sorry, Raymond. \>\> Yeah. \>\> Uh it it is super exciting on these decision models where uh you you have a contract, which is some ideal state, and then you have your messy real-world state, and you can apply a general class decision model like like Jeff to say, is this is this passing or not? \>\> So, I think \>\> in this, but it's coming. \>\> Yeah, and I think I think without um like Dan, again, we're going a lot off script, but it's a great question, and uh the great Jeff-ification is upon us. So, we need to speak to this. Um is uh I think Dan and I both been thinking about this a lot and realized that like um OpenPros itself, the language that's all markdown, I think does not have any place in the Jeff land because they're not generative. Like, so the whole idea of the lang- like it generating a language and understanding a language, like it uh it's not that. But, I think the the two places where we think it would fit really well, and in particular with the hosted run.pros, is one on the back end. So, the the downside or the weakness of OpenPros is it is you are letting the agent say, "I have met the contract. Here it is." Right? And so, I'll often say to people uh like the intent behind OpenPros is similar to something like DSPy where you want to have like this abstraction layer over which you can express very complex workflows. The implementation is the exact opposite
of DSPy. DSPy is like every LLM call is a black box and you you isolate the crap out of that thing. It's all deterministic code. It's all typed interfaces to like only let the
black box do that thing. Dan's approach with open prose is the exact opposite which is like AI is getting smart enough to be the compiler. Like let everything be in fuzzy land. So the the the weakness of it though is like if you run it on Haku or you run it on Fable you're going to get a very different result and and you're also letting it say I'm done. So I think a very natural place for like uh Jev or these new like decision models or whatever we want to call them system one models is like you were saying like as a verifier on the end of the job like very very fast and cheap. Um and then the other thing that I want to build that's relevant to this this is like a router. So like why would I have to go click the button that like oh issues go to the issue job but PRs go to the PR review job. Why don't I just say like okay all the GitHub events that come in like you know solve the issues review the PRs right? Another question. \>\> Don't give them any more ideas about the game. \>\> Okay. \>\> I know I was going to say I was going to \>\> \[laughter\] \>\> Thank you. It's just topical on the Twitter sphere at the exact moment that like why wouldn't you just RL this? Like if I got all these beautiful runs here against the contract why am I not just RLing this? \>\> So So one of the ideas back to the language question is one of the ideas of like why why are we doing this at all in language? Like the original human side of this is like you can commit it to get and you can version control it or you can you know use it in notion or or Jira and and have anybody on your team using it. But from from a engineering side it's the fact that it's all text is like perfect and beautiful for for RL. So, we're not doing that right now, but like that's absolutely something we're talking with various prospects about is like once you have all of your stuff written as text, this is like \>\> Yeah. \>\> a whole lot better for for RL. \>\> Yeah, we haven't hit volumes where this is important, but like if you are hosting the model and you have this 100,000-ish token prefix, then you can like just it or you like, you know, build these um more token efficient representations. So, um Yeah, if someone wants to do a trillion tokens in Open Pros, we'll happily just
it for you. Um So, anyways, to go back, thank you. Those are Those are really good ones. We now have our grumpy senior pull request review. Um and again, like the key idea is so
the agent did all that for us. The key idea here is um uh like the by deploying this job, like this will now start spending money when whenever we get a new PR, so I have to click that. So, then I'm going to confirm that. And then once this is deployed, it'll go when I go back over to my jobs, it will um it will look exactly like uh let's see. So, if we just Oops, I did switch that. Once this loads, we should see and the grumpy one is at the top or the bottom. Yeah, here we go. Grumpy AI skeptic PR review. So, um you can see I was practicing earlier. Um Okay. So, let's see what in terms of this. I think those are the main things. Um Yeah, I'm in charge of run.pros.md, so if you run into any issues, don't tell my boss, you just send it straight to me. Uh and my agents will uh take care of it for you. Um but yeah, I'm really excited about this as just like a a simple, easy-to-use um um way for having these like event-based systems. If you want to see other triggers or other features then that's really fun for me. But again, you don't need to use the hosted thing at all and like you can uh you can use the um the skill instead NPX skills add open prose prose. Um but now uh with that Dan is going to um go through a specific example that is for \[clears throat\] our finance friends um and we're going to show that one uh in
Codex and then he'll use that as an opportunity to talk a little bit more about how all this works under the hood. \>\> Yep. Thank you. \>\> Sure. \>\> Um so
getting that working in the cloud is is interesting. One of the more interesting use cases that we've been talking about with various customers and prospects is um you can this is this is a framework or a language or pattern that you can build in house and you can use you can run it on prem. The whole idea here is that you can run it on prem. You don't need to use our cloud version of it. We'd love you to try it out in the cloud and and and and play with it get a get a feel for that. Um but if this is something that you want to implement uh inside your organization the most interesting use case that we're seeing is on top of open models on top of your own harness bring your own harness and then use this as kind of the application layer on on top of that and that lets you build this full stack in house. You don't have to ship any of your data out to the labs. More important than your data, you don't have to ship out your institutional We like to think of open prose actually as like institutional operational knowledge as documentation, right? Think of it as like standard operating procedures. So even more important than your data is you don't want to be shipping your standard operating procedure out to the big labs. Um and so so this fits really nicely in this stack of of open open source application layer sits on top. We we publish this open open core. Uh it has a permissive license. You can bring it in house and and use it. We have a number of big companies who are are already doing that. Um and and you can bring your own harness. You can use it with the approved models that your company already has. Uh so you don't have to feel like you're throwing data or your organization's knowledge over the wall. Um this is just I mean a a we can get into this a little bit and I want to field more questions. Um this is a a workflow that we're building out for a customer um that is interested in using OpenProse to document their quant models. So uh for those of you who are familiar, um quant models have all sorts of regulatory um um commitments whereby every every 3 years or every 1 year or on certain event changes, you need to update the the model documentation for these quant models. So this is normally a process that we found in our experience that is
uh human white collar, very smart person intensive, right? These people uh maybe some of you probably spend a a share of your your year going through and and
writing documentation. That documents what your model's being used for, under what conditions was it tested, under um uh who who what other models reference it upstream, and a whole slew of other required These are obviously required by the regulators and your internal auditors and your internal compliance. Um so this is this is a a flow that that we've found success running. Uh it's it's perfect because in some ways the regulatory docs are like an OpenProse program, right? And so this these are requirements written as prose. Um and and so I'm going to kick off You can see here uh we're in Codex. You You run this in Cloud Code. You could run this on your own harness. The whole point is that this is harness agnostic. Uh so we we just say boot the kernel. Uh and then pros run and then a specific program. And so I'm going to kick this off and while it runs I can show you like what the kernel looks like uh and then what the program itself looks like. Um just go back to Chrome. And then \>\> Right there. \>\> It's uh that one. So this is the kernel. Um it's markdown. It's not intended to be read by you which is why it's formatted like this. We originally had it in a nice looking format and people complained. They're like, "What is this?" Uh it's meant to be read by the agents. Uh and it's just markdown. It's operating instructions for what to expect. You could think of it a lot like a a bootloader or a resolution path, a an index uh system, a way of finding other documents that you that that the that the agent needs. Um
and then the program itself looks and again this is what I referenced in Codex looks very similar. So this is again markdown. It contains a
whole slew of the requirements that the regulators and the compliance and the auditors are looking for. Uh and this specifies, you know, uh the ideal state of of the end result is going to comply with this contract. Uh and so those are the only two things you pass in. You just pass in the kernel which is published publicly. You can all download that right now uh and and and try it out and then write any program that you want, any contract that requires some complex um set of conditions to satisfy and then the agents are just going to chug and and the you know, the better the harness, the better the model, the the faster and the cheaper that they will produce the output. Uh but the idea is that that you're you're declaring the the result rather than declaring how to how to go about about doing it. Um Let's see we can poke back and see. We ran this with a a relatively cheap model here so that it would run faster. Uh but it's still working. Um Oh, it looks like it's finishing up. So, this is I mean this is the document that it produced. So, in this case we're we're we're um creating documentation for the sofa curve. It's a public uh model. So, we're not showing any any uh internal uh bank data here. Um and this I don't know. Raise a hand. Anybody Are there any like quants in the room? To review it? How does this How does this look? Yeah, \[laughter\] all right. Well, we'll come we'll come we'll come find you afterwards. Um but but so that you know this is this is this is documentation that has to be produced um regularly for every model. A big bank has 4,000 or so models. They have to be re re re-documented yearly and uh this is a this is a a a problem that is worth anywhere between 10 to 50 million dollars a year uh for some of these bigger banks and and we're having great success in in um in doing it for them for for much cheaper. Uh granted there are some some um
Getting this through compliance and the auditors and the regulators is is another part of the battle obviously as I'm sure you're all familiar with but um we we can benchmark this against
historical results. We can benchmark this against how long it takes the teams to do it uh and we have quant you know quants who are on the floor who are able to to rate these and and give us a sense of how how well the models are doing on this and we're finding that it's I mean quite shocking shockingly good. Um for for much cheaper than than traditional uh manual way of doing this. Any questions? Any like \>\> the quants do the stuff that the quants are good at. \>\> Making the models. \>\> Not the regulatory paperwork which probably isn't very fun. I'm not a quant, but \>\> \[snorts\] \>\> Any questions? Great question. Uh yes. And so, actually, um Raymond showing off the chat agent a little bit as part of the kernel, as buried in the markdown at a at a path, we have uh best practices. The These are the types of things you want to be doing when you're declaring out out outcomes. Uh these are um and anti-patterns, things that you shouldn't be doing. And so, yes, there is there is a a world in which you're not typing the whole contract itself, but you're iterating, and and that's what Raymond was showing uh with another agent following our best practice guide on how to on on how to create the contract. But, yeah, I mean, getting getting intent out of people's heads is like the hard part, and and I think this is a piece of it. It's certainly not like the whole \>\> Yeah. I have a slightly like longer uh I don't want to make this too long. We
only have 5 minutes. But, like, a slightly longer rant on this, which is that I do think that this is a big part of why chat like blew up so fast is like you do
not need to know anything about what you're looking for, just start engaging with ChatGPT, and just like the magic of generative AI and like having it like come back to you, right? And so, like, if that's I don't I don't know that OpenProse is the best place if you're at that stage of something where you re you really don't even know the shape of what you're talking about, or you're not even sure like what it is that you're looking for. Um and like this go I'm like a very old-school DSPy user, and like my my joke about DSPy was like, "Oh, no, I have to know what I want now, right?" Because like the whole idea of DSPy is like you have to you create the signature of the thing that you want. And if you and you you you like see something like that, you're like, "This is so awesome." And then you sit down, and you're like, oh I I actually don't know what I want to do I, right? So, I think I think with the you know, Open Prose is a lot less strict than something like DS fire where you like you literally really needed to say the signature of the return object or nothing happens. Um but yeah, I would say like the built-in agent hopefully can like help with some of like you can just turn on the voice and be like, what can you do? Like and it can do almost anything you can do in the app like we you know, we have those hard-coded like confirm things for um for like anything that would cost money. Obviously, we want people like click a button for that. Um but yeah, I think I think it's um I don't know, I think it's also related to like the great jobification is like there are like chat isn't a great um interface and agents that are like RLF to be convincing chat partners are not necessarily like the best type of AI for workflows that don't have human conversation as part of them at all. Um \>\> And let me let me interject, which is just use cases like we tell people you don't want to use this if if you're doing a one-off, if you are like chat is perfect for that. You're if you're in exploratory mode. What this is good for is something you need to do a lot. It it needs to be reliable, it has to be repeatable, it needs to be auditable. Those types of workflows are what what we're what Open Prose is built for and meant for and so there is an implicit like you do know what you need in in here.
\>\> Oh, we got a question from a real quant. \>\> And earlier I alluded to and I I wouldn't just call it inheritance, I would call it composition. So, we we in fact a core feature of of the framework
and and the the pattern itself is it's built to be composed and so yes, injecting multiple contracts into the same uh run in in which the agent now has to satisfy many of them is is is a a core piece here. The other half the event-driven half uh which maybe looks a little bit you might call it inheritance. I I think of it more like um uh I don't know if you're familiar with like React React-style memoization where you have certain components. It's still composition. You have certain components that have upstream dependencies and when the data on on one of them changes, it's of course going to trickle down to everything below it. Um that is another place where Jev is super exciting and and the decision model super exciting because we had built that system and we had agents trying to determine has the state changed and if the state on upstream dependency changes, do we kick off downstream dependency? Uh but that's very expensive to run and Jev becomes suddenly this very cheap like semantic classifier or semantic memoizer, which you could think of it as like a cache and Jev is deciding when something is out of date and now it kicks off everything downstream from that. So, that's another kind of core component of of the framework.
Minus the Jev part, we're still working we're still building that part in. Yes, and there is no magic here. It's all just English. It's all just language. Uh yeah, it's but yes, and that's where
the composition composability comes in. \>\> The other piece to your point is like it's not just a template. So, like you could obviously even pre-LLMs, you could have um or very let's say not very early LLMs or even like encoders could like fill a template for you. Like you like prefix the template and like fill the thing. But here it's like, "Well, what can you template?" And so, you could template the entire multi-agent workflow. So, like this the simple example that I give is you could say like the output that I need is an article. You know, and maybe there's it's got like this type of article, it's going to be this length, whatever, right? Some constraints around that. And the input is like the topic. Like until you've got a good article for me, and the parent agent decides good, it decides when to exit, so that's where you're going to get a better result with a stronger model than a weaker one. I've got a researcher sub-agent. That agent has my access CLI and my access skill on how to use a CLI cuz I don't want it, you know, using any random web search. I've got a writer sub-agent that has my special like here's the last 10 articles I wrote that are really good, and you I want you to write like this. I've got a copy editor uh sub-agent, and that whole thing is just maybe \>\> But the really important 100 lines of markdown, and it might take them 10 hours to do it. \>\> important parts to emphasize there is is the contract composition where so you you you go to like, I mean, these things
have been around forever. Any Any Any workflow builder, drag-and-drop workflow builder. That's a different way of thinking about this because when you think about this in terms of that like DAG
directed acyclic graph of contracts, you can have intermediary steps that you almost think of them as like checkpoints or like this intermediary step meets the contract, and the thing is going, and it hits this contract and fulfills this one, and then that causes the next one to keep going until it's fulfilled that contract. So, you can you can still in some ways declare the how to get there just by composing these intermediary contracts along the way and still letting the agents be a little bit flexible on on how to do achieve that intermediary step. \>\> Yeah, and and the shape of it. So, like one one example like when Claude um the dynamic workflows came out, they had this blog post that's like, here's the six types, right? And it's like one of them's like fan out, fan in, and like a map reduce with sub agents. One of them's like a adversarial review, one's like a loop until X condition is met, right? And all of those things you can express in a prose program and then run them on on any agent. So, you can like you can template the shape of the the multi-agent workflow um with no code. Um and again, the whole it's only possible because the the agents are like good at managing themselves and because most harnesses have sub agents. So, like if you're running plain vanilla pie, which has no sub agents at least last time I checked, you're going to want sub agents for it to do that more complex kind of workflow. But, like essentially any harness that has one of
the requirements, \>\> Sub agents. \>\> sub agents is pretty much the only one for most \>\> context. \>\> Yeah, like um like bash and sub agents are actually you don't even need bash. We can run
these in VM isolates in code mode, too. So, \>\> Any other questions? We can give 10 minutes back to everyone. Uh it is based on my many years of engineering experience and dealing with people who sometimes are not very good at expressing requirements and other people who are very good at expressing requirements. And it's also, I mean, we we benchmark these internally and and run them against we we have sort of an evolutionary algorithm where we can shrink the kernel by seeing if if they can conform to that. So, it's based on practice and empirical results. Uh \>\> Yeah, you can just have that as a spec and you could have like let's say you like um uh Matt Pocock's like uh spec, you know, you like Matt I built a funny one just to like troll him that was like auto Pocock and it basically it was my way of proving that my way of wiring skills in works. So, you basically just he has a workflow that's like grill me, you know, and then you ask all these questions and then it's like TDD and then all these other ones and you can put the whole thing in one prose program and just be like do Matt Pocock's workflow and every sub-agent has to load at every stage of the program you have to load this the next skill in the sequence. Um so yeah, you can absolutely like \>\> do have people I I wasn't calling it spectrum driven development, but like almost by its very nature it is spectrum driven development. I'd love you to try this out. Try it or come find me after and like whatever spectrum driven development specification you have, we
could compose with the boot kernel prose run and then we'll see how it does. I I think it would do quite well actually. That's a good good inspiration. I haven't tried it with the spectrum
driven development contracts. Like I'd love to sit down and and and try it and see if it overrides it or if it starts colliding. \>\> That'd be interesting like um \>\> Here's Here's one \>\> See how much different skills like throw it off. \>\> Here's one thing we do have and software engineers using Open Prose to develop software. Uh more of our users are using Open Prose to do ops and product management and um quant model documentation and non I don't know software engineering stuff. Uh I think it's just the blend of like markdown documentation actually is more interesting to non-engineers um as a result. Yeah. Any other questions? Thank you all. Appreciate your time. \>\> \[applause\]
