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
- ConstellationSystems forget how they know. An experimental system that keeps a worker apart from the decisions about its work: whether that exact work may run, and whether it actually happened. The main current project. Alpha 2 accepted 2026-10-02: one governed service start on two fresh Ubuntu 22.04 virtual machines from a published source-free bundle, checked by separate fresh observations; a prerelease, not a general suite. 0.1.0-alpha.6 remains the released integration profile; an operator beta is in preparation; not production-ready.
- ABSDA small experimental x86-64 operating system, built partly to test the same ideas below the application layer.
- 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.