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Software Is About Promises

Software Is About Promises

3 comments

·June 9, 2025
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hosh

There's an entire semi-formal language on promises, called promise theory. This includes promises autonomous agents (humans, back when this was conceived) make for other autonomous agents. Promise Theory was the basis for CFEngine, which spawned Puppet and Chef, but it's applicability is much broader. The kind of promises examined within this article can be described and analyzed by promise theory.

The central insight is understanding that promises are not obligations, and why and how that matters. From there, interesting things can be analyzed -- using types and contracts in a development team, unit tests, integration tests, specs, user interface and user experience, compliance, signaling, APIs, etc.

I think it is particularly useful now in the age of LLMs, agenic AIs, and autonomous robots that have to navigate spaces shared with humans.

https://markburgess.org/promises.html

agumonkey

Not long ago I discovered that there was a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_strategy#Call_by_fu... term

lkjla43

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