James Beck
Research and working software on a question 26 years in operations and reliability kept asking: when an automated system reports that something worked, how does anyone know it did?
“The command returned” and “the intended thing happened” are different facts. The gap matters for deploy pipelines and scheduled jobs, and it matters more now that AI coding agents report their own success: a worker’s report of completion is not evidence that the intended state exists. This site collects the software, papers and proofs that work has produced.
Current work
- ConstellationAn experimental system that separates observation, permission for exact work, execution custody and independent verification. Workbench presents the bounded operational spine to an operator. Constellation canonical candidate — 2026-10-10. Owner-approved on 2026-10-10 as a candidate for human evaluation, following lab-guest qualification and AI review. This is not Beta Candidate 1 acceptance. Agent-driven lab checks exercised installation, a governed Start, refusal cases and reboot; these are not human-usability evidence. The human newcomer study is prepared and has not been run. Distribution is authorized for human evaluation only. The candidate is not publicly available; public pinned documents describe the earlier prepared-source snapshot. Not Beta Candidate 1 or a beta release. Alpha 2 remains the published packaged prerelease; 0.1.0-alpha.6 remains the immutable released integration profile.
- ABSDA small experimental x86-64 operating system. The public technical preview absd-preview-20261010 was built, booted and SSH smoke-tested from a clean clone under QEMU. The kernel suite and core gate were not run on these preview revisions; earlier qualification remains revision-scoped. Physical hardware support is not established.
- PapersFormal and semi-formal work on timing, verification lag and stability in hierarchical systems, mostly the Δt series.
- Lean proofsSelected claims from the Δt series, machine-checked in Lean 4. They prove the boundaries of refusal classes, not that any deployed system is safe.
- WritingEssays and notes, kept on a separate site.
Selected research
Earlier demonstrations
Before Constellation, the same question was worked through on a smaller Python predecessor, agent_governor, now deprecated. These pages still run and still say something true, but they describe historical implementations, not current recommendations.
- A stale yesA credential that was valid when checked, used one second after it expired, and refused with a receipt. Captured 2026-07-29.
- The incidentThe same event written as a postmortem.
- GlossaryThe vocabulary used across the older pages.
- LimitsWhat the older demonstrations and receipts do and do not show.
The Constellation material that used to fill this page has moved: status ledger · how to read the labels · adopting one piece · transitions under study · authored design layer · four-office exhibit · earlier prototype · July 2026 artifacts.