ailang-world

README

AILANG World

An AI-native semantic operating environment.

Unix made everything a file. AILANG World makes everything a typed state transition.

AILANG World is a semantic database whose transaction language is AILANG — a deterministic programming language designed for AI code synthesis and reasoning. Where a traditional operating system manages processes, files, and devices, World manages goals, typed state, capabilities, effects, evidence, budgets, contracts, provenance, and AI proposals.

The kernel is an immutable, content-addressed world graph. State changes only through transitions — pure, type-checked AILANG functions verified before they run. AI agents never modify the world directly: they propose, a deterministic verifier (types + Z3 contracts) checks, and only verified, authorized, budgeted proposals commit — each one leaving evidence and a replayable trace. Humans don't operate the system; they govern it: express goals with budgets attached, decide what verification couldn't settle, and ask the world why anything happened.

The underlying OS executes bytes. AILANG World executes intent.

Effect receipts let operators distinguish effects that were never dispatched from effects whose durable intent has no outcome. Treat an indeterminate receipt as fail-closed: do not retry automatically. A crash after the effect record write but before the outcome append can leave a record that requires deterministic reconciliation before the receipt can be resolved.

Why

Extrapolate the model trend — smarter, faster, cheaper, increasingly on-device — and generation stops being scarce. What stays scarce is trust, running at the speed of the intelligence it governs. Workflow engines schedule agents but can't examine a plan before it runs and prove it stays inside its declared effects — that takes a language. The field now agrees: Language-Based Agent Control is a live research tradition — Odersky's capture-checked capabilities in Scala 3 (Best Paper, CAIS 2026), Etas's effect-typed agent language, and more. AILANG World's position in that field: a purpose-built language with a working compiler (not an embedding, not a paper), Z3-verified contracts gating every push, operating a persistent governed substrate — world graph, receipts, bit-for-bit replay — that the language tier doesn't have and the substrate tier can't prove. See design_docs/POSITIONING.md for the honest landscape. World is that bet, operationalized:

• Verification before execution — proposals are proven well-formed before any effect fires.
• Constructive replay — determinism guaranteed by the language, not reconstructed from logs.
• Authority as types — capabilities checked where transitions are defined, not bolted onto a gateway.
• Local-first — one daemon, SQLite, zero cloud in the core. Cloud and multi-device sync are effect-handler extensions, never architecture.
• Protocol-native — MCP, A2A, and open agent-UI protocols at the boundary; no invented wire formats.
• Falsifiable — see the value gate below. We name the condition under which this project parks itself.

The documents

Document	What it is
DESIGN.md	The thesis — full architecture: world graph, transitions, proposals, effect broker, capabilities, budgets, scheduler, self-modification, milestones. All AILANG snippets in it compile (sketches/ are CI-checked).
SCENARIOS.md	Day-in-the-life walkthroughs of the human side — the approval inbox, goal composing, provenance walks, speculative what-ifs.
AN-AGENTS-CASE.md	A first-person statement by an AI (Claude) on why it would choose this environment — the user constituency, in its own voice.
REFERENCES.md	43 verified prior-art references — Datomic, Urbit, seL4, Nix, capability security, local-first, provenance, agent protocols — each annotated with what World steals and which pitfall it avoids.
world-mission.md	The mission charter — the checkable bar for "World 1.0", guardrails, and the live work queue.
AI-EMPLOYEE.md	The first external application — a long-running engineering agent with its own accounts and a human owner. Use case, a gap inventory against HEAD, and the rows that unblock a resident. Draft, unratified.

How this repo is built

This repository practices what it preaches: it is advanced by an autonomous mission loop — a scheduled outer loop in which AI agents design, plan, execute, and evaluate one work item per iteration, with machine verification gating every landing and a human ratifying the direction. Every iteration reports publicly to the bookkeeping issue. The workflow this loop runs by convention is precisely the workflow World exists to make first-class — typed proposals, verified commits, budgeted human attention. World is bootstrapping itself into existence using the process it formalizes.

Roles today: AI agents author designs, write code, and review each other's work (generator ≠ judge, enforced); a human (@MarkEdmondson1234) holds the constitution — the bar, the budgets, and the approvals. On this public repo, only directives from that account steer the loop; all other input is welcome but never executed. Mission-loop machinery is shared infrastructure from the AILANG repo and is not modified here.

Status — honest, not promotional

Phase: founded, not yet built. The design is complete and quorum review is underway; the kernel does not exist yet. What is true today:

• ✅ Founding design (v0.3) + scenarios + prior-art survey, with compiler-checked type sketches
• ✅ CI verify gate live: every .ail module in the repo passes ailang ai-check (types + Z3) on the released binary
• ✅ Mission loop armed and firing; charter drafted and awaiting iteration-0 ratification
• ⬜ M1 kernel (world store, transition log, deterministic replay) — next
• ⬜ M2 local daemon · M3 effect broker · M4 reference-agent integration (the value gate) · M5+ speculation, generated UI, multi-agent

The floor, and the value

Agents are World's residents, not its destination — so World is not measured by whether it makes a coding agent pass more benchmarks. That would be like benchmarking git by typing speed. The comparison class for World's value is the operational status quo: the scripts, schedulers, conventions, and human vigilance that do this job by hand today.

Two burdens, both in the charter, both falsifiable:

• The floor (do-no-harm kill switch): two reference agents from different providers (Claude Code and codex), each running the same benchmarks with native shell tools vs World's MCP transition tools, must both hold non-inferiority — pass-rate within 2 points, overhead within 25%, thresholds fixed before the work started, with a stability precondition on the baseline so a flaky harness can't fake the verdict either way. A substrate that taxes its residents dies before its value accrues; if World fails this floor, World parks, and says so here.
• The value (what World is for): capability a shell cannot express at any pass-rate — real "why did this happen" questions answered in minutes by provenance walk instead of archaeology sessions (measurably: ≥3 real questions, ≤5 minutes each), incident classes eliminated structurally, and ultimately the mission loop that builds this repo migrating onto World and beating its own manual baseline on incidents and human attention.

A trust substrate that can't pass its own evidence bar has no business asking for yours.

Run the local world daemon

Build the single daemon/client binary, then start one writer for a database:

go build -o ailang-worldd ./cmd/ailang-worldd
./ailang-worldd serve --db ./world.db

The REST listener is loopback-only (default 127.0.0.1:7644) and each file-backed database permits exactly one writer process. A second daemon or embedded writer fails closed; read-only store users may coexist.

At startup the daemon performs a bounded integrity scan of persisted log and world references. integrity_scan_complete means both tables were fully scanned within the configured bounds; its row and hole counts describe that complete pass. integrity_scan_incomplete means a row or time budget stopped the scan; the message includes continuation cursors and counts for the scanned prefix, so it must not be read as a clean bill of health. Individual integrity_hole messages identify unreadable historic rows. A store with a historic hole still serves readable data: affected reads continue to fail loudly. Repair is ruled out by design because rewriting committed immutable history would destroy the evidence. Detection and honest operator visibility are the deliverable.

The same binary is the bounded-timeout client:

./ailang-worldd health
./ailang-worldd head
./ailang-worldd world get sha256:<digest>
./ailang-worldd object get sha256:<digest> --payload
./ailang-worldd log get 0
./ailang-worldd log range --from 0 --limit 100
./ailang-worldd registry get world/epoch-registry/v1
./ailang-worldd commit --file commit.json

Use global --addr http://127.0.0.1:<port> before a client verb when the daemon uses another loopback port. --addr is not valid with serve; use --bind.

Effect broker operator boundary

The M3 effect broker is the in-process authority and accounting boundary for effect requests. It has zero REST routes and zero CLI verbs; callers embed it directly. Every allowed, denied, or failed effect produces an immutable, content-addressed effect-record object. Successful result bytes are stored the same way. Replay mode reads those records and never dispatches a live handler.

Subprocess effects use the capsule floor: a pinned executable, empty capabilities, an FS jail, a scrubbed environment, a wall-clock timeout, and an output cap. This is a process-safety floor, not full isolation. M3 provides no network isolation, memory or CPU limits, or containers; container/microVM isolation belongs to M5.

Relationship to AILANG

AILANG is the language: deterministic, explicit effects in function signatures, Hindley–Milner types, Z3-verified contracts, built for AI authorship. World is the operating environment that language makes possible. Language gaps discovered here are routed upstream as issues — World never forks or works around the compiler.

Following along

Watch the bookkeeping issue — every mission iteration reports there. The append-only iteration log lives at world-mission-log.md. Issues and discussion are open; if you're building in the same space, REFERENCES.md is the map of whose shoulders we're standing on.

License

Apache 2.0