Alasdair Allan
@alasdairallan.com
Scientist, author, hacker, maker, and journalist. Writes, speaks, and builds. An accidental privacy advocate.
Pinned
Alasdair Allan
@alasdairallan.com
· Mar 1
Vera — A language designed for machines to write
A programming language where verification is a first-class citizen. Mandatory contracts, algebraic effects, typed slot references, compiles to WebAssembly.
veralang.dev
I built a programming language you're not supposed to read, veralang.dev. Vera is designed for machines to write. No variable names. No style choices. Compiler errors are instructions for the model, not diagnostics for you. Go and point a model at it, negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/28/a....
In 1988 a company that made record turntables built its own CPU, because it hated its factory software. It failed. Every one of those ideas ships today. Hardware memory safety. Garbage collection in silicon. Persistent objects. Chips shaped to a workload. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/07/18/t...
The computer at the bottom of a canal
Somewhere at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde Canal, buried in the silt, there is a box of custom silicon that was right about almost everything. Back in 1988 a Scottish hi-fi company shipped a proce...
negroniventurestudios.com
July 18, 2026 at 8:29 AM
In 1988 a company that made record turntables built its own CPU, because it hated its factory software. It failed. Every one of those ideas ships today. Hardware memory safety. Garbage collection in silicon. Persistent objects. Chips shaped to a workload. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/07/18/t...
Vera now has a language (LSP) server, so it gets the same editor support as any other language. A normal one checks whether your code parses. Vera's also checks whether it still proves, every contract re-verified by Z3 as you type. veralang.dev #AI #LLM
June 12, 2026 at 2:06 PM
Vera now has a language (LSP) server, so it gets the same editor support as any other language. A normal one checks whether your code parses. Vera's also checks whether it still proves, every contract re-verified by Z3 as you type. veralang.dev #AI #LLM
"A Distribution of One," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. App releases are surging but downloads are flat. The industry sees failure. I don't think so. Most of those apps were never looking for an audience. That was the point. #SaaS #AI negroniventurestudios.com/2026/06/09/a...
A distribution of one
Most of the software being built right now will never have more than one user. The industry thinks that is a failure. I think it is the entire point; and that it signals the end of the fifty-year comp...
negroniventurestudios.com
June 9, 2026 at 11:23 AM
"A Distribution of One," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. App releases are surging but downloads are flat. The industry sees failure. I don't think so. Most of those apps were never looking for an audience. That was the point. #SaaS #AI negroniventurestudios.com/2026/06/09/a...
"It Wasn't Built for This," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. GitHub built Copilot. Copilot drove agent adoption. Agent adoption broke GitHub. The feedback loop nobody wants to talk about. #GitHub #AI #Copilot negroniventurestudios.com/2026/05/27/i...
It wasn’t built for this
GitHub’s platform uptime over the last 90 days is 86.98%. That is not a typo. Marek Šuppa, who built an independent tracker because GitHub stopped publishing aggregate uptime numbers on its own status...
negroniventurestudios.com
May 27, 2026 at 5:10 PM
"It Wasn't Built for This," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. GitHub built Copilot. Copilot drove agent adoption. Agent adoption broke GitHub. The feedback loop nobody wants to talk about. #GitHub #AI #Copilot negroniventurestudios.com/2026/05/27/i...
Announcing agentlanguages.dev, a community-edited catalogue of the 21 programming languages designed for AI agents to emerge since late 2025. The most interesting thing to emerge? They fall into three philosophical camps that disagree on the underlying problem. #AI #LLM
agentlanguages.dev — Programming languages designed for AI agents to write
A community-edited catalogue of programming languages designed for AI agents to author code, organised around three philosophical camps: syntactic, verification, and orchestration.
agentlanguages.dev
May 20, 2026 at 5:39 PM
Announcing agentlanguages.dev, a community-edited catalogue of the 21 programming languages designed for AI agents to emerge since late 2025. The most interesting thing to emerge? They fall into three philosophical camps that disagree on the underlying problem. #AI #LLM
"Three camps alike in dignity," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. Seventeen languages for AI agents. Three diagnosis camps. One field that didn't exist six months ago. I built one of them and went looking for the others. #AI #ProgrammingLanguages #Vera negroniventurestudios.com/2026/05/20/t...
Three camps alike in dignity
In the last six months, programming languages designed for models rather than humans have started to appear. Work on most began entirely independently, initiated by people who had never heard of each ...
negroniventurestudios.com
May 20, 2026 at 9:29 AM
"Three camps alike in dignity," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. Seventeen languages for AI agents. Three diagnosis camps. One field that didn't exist six months ago. I built one of them and went looking for the others. #AI #ProgrammingLanguages #Vera negroniventurestudios.com/2026/05/20/t...
"Documentation-First Programming," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. If AI writes the code, what does the human write? The part of the job most developers hate has now become the whole job. #LLM #AI #Documentation negroniventurestudios.com/2026/05/19/d...
Documentation-first programming
I find it somewhat ironic that the part of the job that most developers hate is about to become the whole job. Because, at least as far as I can figure out, we are now in the era of documentation-firs...
negroniventurestudios.com
May 19, 2026 at 4:34 PM
"Documentation-First Programming," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. If AI writes the code, what does the human write? The part of the job most developers hate has now become the whole job. #LLM #AI #Documentation negroniventurestudios.com/2026/05/19/d...
Reposted by Alasdair Allan
Know someone who should come to a future #dotastro event? Use our nomination form here anytime: dotastronomy.com/nominate
Nominate Someone for .Astronomy — .Astronomy
Know someone who would be great at .Astronomy? Tell us about them.
dotastronomy.com
May 3, 2026 at 8:28 AM
Know someone who should come to a future #dotastro event? Use our nomination form here anytime: dotastronomy.com/nominate
Expanded the Vera benchmark to 6 models, 3 providers. Kimi K2.5 got every Vera problem right while only managing 86% in Python and 91% in TypeScript. Flagship average Vera and Python level at 93%. Yet there is no Vera in their training data, no examples on GitHub or Stack Overflow. veralang.dev #AI
April 9, 2026 at 8:52 AM
Expanded the Vera benchmark to 6 models, 3 providers. Kimi K2.5 got every Vera problem right while only managing 86% in Python and 91% in TypeScript. Flagship average Vera and Python level at 93%. Yet there is no Vera in their training data, no examples on GitHub or Stack Overflow. veralang.dev #AI
That's been a productive morning! github.com/aallan/vera/...
March 29, 2026 at 11:24 AM
That's been a productive morning! github.com/aallan/vera/...
The #Vera v0.0.101 release makes LLM calls first-class algebraic effects. An agent calling another model declares in its type signature. Type-checked, contract-verified, every side effect explicit. As far as I know, no other language can do this! veralang.dev #AI #LLM #Programming
March 28, 2026 at 5:29 PM
The #Vera v0.0.101 release makes LLM calls first-class algebraic effects. An agent calling another model declares in its type signature. Type-checked, contract-verified, every side effect explicit. As far as I know, no other language can do this! veralang.dev #AI #LLM #Programming
I built a programming language you're not supposed to read, veralang.dev. Vera is designed for machines to write. No variable names. No style choices. Compiler errors are instructions for the model, not diagnostics for you. Go and point a model at it, negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/28/a....
Vera — A language designed for machines to write
A programming language where verification is a first-class citizen. Mandatory contracts, algebraic effects, typed slot references, compiles to WebAssembly.
veralang.dev
March 1, 2026 at 2:01 PM
I built a programming language you're not supposed to read, veralang.dev. Vera is designed for machines to write. No variable names. No style choices. Compiler errors are instructions for the model, not diagnostics for you. Go and point a model at it, negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/28/a....
First signal for the end of what I’ve always called “the platform problem” for #AI. It’s not about the platform anymore, it’s about actions. It’s about AI acting, not chatting. venturebeat.com/technology/o...
OpenAI's acquisition of OpenClaw signals the beginning of the end of the ChatGPT era
The move represents OpenAI's most aggressive bet yet on the idea that the future of AI isn't about what models can say, but what they can do
venturebeat.com
February 18, 2026 at 6:52 PM
First signal for the end of what I’ve always called “the platform problem” for #AI. It’s not about the platform anymore, it’s about actions. It’s about AI acting, not chatting. venturebeat.com/technology/o...
"The web just got a second audience," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. Google shipped WebMCP in Chrome. Cloudflare shipped Markdown for Agents. Both quiet. Neither made the front page. But the web just forked its audience. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/18/t...
The web just got a second audience
Buried in a quiet announcement on a developer mailing list at the beginning of last week was a point of inflection, the point where the web stopped being just for humans. WebMCP lets websites declare ...
negroniventurestudios.com
February 18, 2026 at 2:17 PM
"The web just got a second audience," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. Google shipped WebMCP in Chrome. Cloudflare shipped Markdown for Agents. Both quiet. Neither made the front page. But the web just forked its audience. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/18/t...
"The valley and the monomyth," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. Every pitch deck is a Hero's Journey. Silicon Valley's greatest export isn't technology, nit's storytelling. The facts don't change the world. The stories do. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/09/t...
negroniventurestudios.com
February 9, 2026 at 10:56 PM
"The valley and the monomyth," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. Every pitch deck is a Hero's Journey. Silicon Valley's greatest export isn't technology, nit's storytelling. The facts don't change the world. The stories do. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/09/t...
"The Ghost in the Statistical Machine," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. We anthropomorphise #AI agents, give them names, identities, "souls." If we anthropomorphise them enough, do they start acting more like us? At what point does it matter? negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/06/t...
The ghost in the statistical machine
Over the last two weeks we’ve all been capitvated by Moltbook, the social network for AI agents. Moltbook is built on top of Openclaw (née Moltbot, née Clawdbot, the project so good they named it thri...
negroniventurestudios.com
February 6, 2026 at 1:04 PM
"The Ghost in the Statistical Machine," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. We anthropomorphise #AI agents, give them names, identities, "souls." If we anthropomorphise them enough, do they start acting more like us? At what point does it matter? negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/06/t...
Someone watched the Mac vs PC ads back in the day. @anthropic.com have gone on the offensive with adverts against ads, and they just buried OpenAI without even mentioning them. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia... www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBSa...
How can I communicate better with my mom?
YouTube video by Anthropic
www.youtube.com
February 4, 2026 at 8:02 PM
Someone watched the Mac vs PC ads back in the day. @anthropic.com have gone on the offensive with adverts against ads, and they just buried OpenAI without even mentioning them. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia... www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBSa...
"The new programmers? ," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. What does a programming language built for #AI look like? No syntax, no variable names, and no text, just components composed under formal contracts. Less like coding, more like hardware design. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/01/12/t...
negroniventurestudios.com
January 12, 2026 at 2:44 PM
"The new programmers? ," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. What does a programming language built for #AI look like? No syntax, no variable names, and no text, just components composed under formal contracts. Less like coding, more like hardware design. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/01/12/t...
"Technology does not solve problems," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. The best technology becomes invisible precisely because it's fundamental, it dissolves the old interaction model entirely. The worst adds friction while demanding attention. negroniventurestudios.com/2025/12/03/t...
negroniventurestudios.com
December 3, 2025 at 6:13 PM
"Technology does not solve problems," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. The best technology becomes invisible precisely because it's fundamental, it dissolves the old interaction model entirely. The worst adds friction while demanding attention. negroniventurestudios.com/2025/12/03/t...
"We need a new Turing Test," by me for Negroni Venture Studios. The real test for artificial general intelligence isn't fooling humans, it's demonstrating flexible real-world competence that our token-prediction architectures fundamentally can't deliver. negroniventurestudios.com/2025/11/30/w...
We need a new Turing Test
Every time there is some sort of perceived advance towards a general artificial intelligence, we talk about it as a breakthrough, right up until we understand what it’s doing, how it’s “thinking”. The...
negroniventurestudios.com
November 30, 2025 at 7:43 PM
"We need a new Turing Test," by me for Negroni Venture Studios. The real test for artificial general intelligence isn't fooling humans, it's demonstrating flexible real-world competence that our token-prediction architectures fundamentally can't deliver. negroniventurestudios.com/2025/11/30/w...
AI is an assistive technology. It'll be a long time, if ever, before it's anything more than that. Anyone that tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
AI agents tried to do graphic design, video editing, game development, and administrative chores like scraping data. "Even the best could perform less than 3 percent of the work, earning $1,810 out of a possible $143,991," writes @willknight.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/ai-age...
AI Agents Are Terrible Freelance Workers
A new benchmark measures how well AI agents can automate economically valuable chores. Human-level AI is still some ways off.
www.wired.com
October 29, 2025 at 11:34 PM
AI is an assistive technology. It'll be a long time, if ever, before it's anything more than that. Anyone that tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
Resurfacing something I wrote for Hackster.io last year, "Dividing the Stack into Thirds," talking about the ongoing trade wars the splintering of our global approach to technology. www.hackster.io/news/dividin...
Hackster.io - The community dedicated to learning hardware.
Hackster is a community dedicated to learning hardware, from beginner to pro. Share your projects and learn from other developers. Come build awesome hardware!
Hackster.io
October 29, 2025 at 11:02 PM
Resurfacing something I wrote for Hackster.io last year, "Dividing the Stack into Thirds," talking about the ongoing trade wars the splintering of our global approach to technology. www.hackster.io/news/dividin...
"Don’t build platforms, solve problems," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. It turns out that #AI will commoditize the mediocre and automated, but amplify the value of the obsessive and hand-crafted. negroniventurestudios.com/2025/10/29/d...
negroniventurestudios.com
October 29, 2025 at 10:03 PM
"Don’t build platforms, solve problems," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. It turns out that #AI will commoditize the mediocre and automated, but amplify the value of the obsessive and hand-crafted. negroniventurestudios.com/2025/10/29/d...
On this day in 1971, the U.K. successful reached orbit using the Black Arrow launch vehicle lifting the Prospero satellite to orbit from Woomera, Australia. The U.K. remains the only country to reach orbit after already cancelling their launch programme. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_A...
Black Arrow - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
October 28, 2025 at 8:16 PM
On this day in 1971, the U.K. successful reached orbit using the Black Arrow launch vehicle lifting the Prospero satellite to orbit from Woomera, Australia. The U.K. remains the only country to reach orbit after already cancelling their launch programme. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_A...
Anyone else getting nostalgia for the Nokia 3650? www.theverge.com/news/793136/...
Google Japan’s concept keyboard is inspired by rotary phones
Speedy touch typists might want to look away.
www.theverge.com
October 7, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Anyone else getting nostalgia for the Nokia 3650? www.theverge.com/news/793136/...