Jeffrey Sabarese ( @ajaxstardust )

Part V of the contract-style-comments Series

Abstract: Classical Design by Contract (DbC) implicitly relies on the "Memory Axiom"—the assumption that human collaborators possess persistent contextual memory. The emergence of stateless AI agents as primary code-producers invalidates this axiom. We propose that in an agentic workflow, the contract must transcend its role as a correctness specification and become a complete, self-contained reconstruction of system intent .

I. The Memory Axiom in Classical Engineering

Bertrand Meyer’s Design by Contract (1988) provided the foundational vocabulary for robust software components: Preconditions, Postconditions, and Invariants. This framework was designed for an era where the primary bottleneck was human error, yet it relied on an unstated premise: the collaborator has memory.

The developer who writes the contract carries it forward. The compiler tracks types across files.…