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07 May, 2026

Thesis: reliable agents tackling complex tasks need deterministic control flow encoded in software, not increasingly elaborate prompt chains

If you’ve ever resorted to MANDATORY or DO NOT SKIP , you’ve hit the ceiling of prompting.

Imagine a programming language where statements are suggestions and functions return “Success” while hallucinating . Reasoning becomes impossible; reliability collapses as complexity grows.

Software scales through recursive composability: systems built from libraries, modules, and functions. It’s code all the way down. Code exposes predictable behavior, enabling local reasoning. Prompt chains lack this property. While useful for narrow tasks, prompts are non-deterministic, weakly specified, and difficult to verify.

Reliability requires moving logic out of prose and into runtime.…