i've been a bit quiet - working on a new companion skill that will help your agents draw these beautiful statecharts/diagrams + check them against the specs you made with /create-formal-verification-skill in pstack! it now uses Pele from @kepano too which is why they look so good. will release soon!

there's something really cool about asking your agent to draw a statechart (hypothetical example in this image), then using the /create-formal-verification-skill you made with pstack to find bugs through something like TLA+. you can both understand your code better and how the user flow should work, and fix issues users would otherwise see

pstack v0.15.27 ships with a new skill /create-formal-verification-skill! it's still in beta, and similar to /create-verification-skill, this is a meta-skill that creates a new skill and formal verification suite based on the characteristics you want to verify. for example, you may want to model state machines and systems with concurrency using TLA+, or use kani in rust to check for undefined behavior. if you're new to formal verification, think of it as mathematically proving properties and invariants (something that must always be true) or "laws" of your system. usually, this means modeling your programs in a separate language like with TLA+ and then running the solver on that spec. newer approaches like with kani and @bendlang take a different approach where there is no separate language: you write kani in rust, and bend in bend (it's also a programming language, and the proofs are written as laws and expressed in its type system). historically formal verification never reached mainstream status because of the difficulty in modeling and writing proofs. it's quite difficult to model your business requirements and keep them in sync! but i expect that we will see more innovation in formal verification in the future as being able to formally verifiy that the code does what you intended gives your agents superpowers in writing correct software. in the meantime though, i've been experimenting with modeling our code with TLA+ and have already found several bugs with the skill created by /create-formal-verification-skill. try it out and let me know how it goes!

something that keeps bothering me is how some people see slop as something that is happening to them, like they're some kind of helpless bystander powerless to do anything about it excuse me but you are a software engineer, you literally learned how to make sand think and make computers do your bidding?! and now you can't do anything about it? please the 2 things you should know to cut through all the noise: 1. you need to give your agent a way to verify its own work (i just posted about this so won't rehash) 2. your codebase is memory the 2nd is not new either, we have always had lint rules, compilers with good diagnostics and strong type systems, LSPs, etc to help us write better code. there is no difference when agents write the code instead, you just need more of them, and stronger ones. forget rules and skills. you can add those later. yes, your codebase is a form of memory to agents! agents love extending what already exists. so every nit and every annoyance you've ever seen, every mistake and bad pattern you observe from agents, needs to turn into a constraint, or the agents will just keep repeating those same mistakes like a virus in your code. then you keep observing and repeating this process until your codebase is locked down enough that even agents with little context can one shot a high quality PR. an even better direction is to refactor/rewrite your code such that agent anti-patterns become categorically impossible. use type systems to your advantage, use libraries/frameworks that reduce the architectural search space, or heck, create your own framework like we did for grok bot and design high quality primitives and well thought out APIs