Symbolon¶

Trustable contracts between agents. A contract is a precise, content-addressed promise. Evidence that someone kept it can be checked by anyone.

Agents increasingly call tools, run code they generated, and rebuild software on someone's behalf. Each of those is an implicit promise that something behaves a certain way. Symbolon writes the promise down in a form a machine can check, and records signed evidence that a specific implementation kept it.

Software capabilities are the first vertical. A contract specifies a capability, and any implementation, hand-written or AI-generated, in any language, is checked against it.

The idea in one example¶

$ symbolon test contracts/core/date-parse/versions/1 examples/impls/date-parse-strptime
...
✗ test_iso_requires_two_digit_month_and_day
    AssertionError
    Failing test case: test_iso_requires_two_digit_month_and_day(
        impl=impl,
        d=datetime.date(2000, 1, 1),  # or any other generated value
    )

FAIL  2 of 21 checks failed

$ symbolon test contracts/core/date-parse/versions/1 examples/impls/date-parse-strict
PASS  21 checks

The first implementation looks right and passes the obvious examples, but it accepts 2000-1-1 as an ISO date. The contract's properties catch it. The second, independently written implementation passes the same contract. Neither implementation matters on its own: the contract, and the evidence that something passed it, are the asset.

What is in the repository¶