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#nitwyt Workbench

Making COMPILE Compiler-Grade

This was too expensive and too iterative, but it wasn’t wasted. Part of that cost was mine. I’m not a software developer, and I paid an architecture-learning tax figuring out where Prompt Forge needed harder boundaries, deterministic controls and independent verification.

The payoff was substantial.

I spent the afternoon and evening tightening Prompt Forge and getting COMPILE lean and squared away.

  • Split the system into COMPILE and RUN so the compiler builds the contract and the runner executes it.
  • Built an external deterministic test harness to catch loops, bad references, provenance mistakes, scope leaks, illegal states and COMPILE accidentally doing RUN work.
  • Ran live tests across event planning, SaaS strategy comparison, reviewer-based landing-page QA, vendor outreach with approval gates, city ranking and a 16-week launch plan.
  • Tightened the distinction between what the user actually said and what the compiler generated.
  • Added checks for compiler-created eligibility rules, weights, thresholds, tie-breakers and other generated logic that can change the final outcome.
  • Applied Igor’s deterministic-verifier / differential-fuzzing idea from his FUTO presentation in Austin. A second independent verifier now checks the production validator.
  • Added fuzzing that intentionally breaks contracts to verify that both validators catch the failures they are supposed to catch.

That last change materially improved the testing.

I didn’t copy Igor’s Lean implementation. I took the core idea of running a simpler independent oracle beside the production validator and applied it to Prompt Forge.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1td0Ux0PtekyQK_LI67AEdqL5B9kMAJPZB5vpWdyzJSs/edit?usp=sharing

COMPILE is starting to behave less like a giant prompt and more like an actual compiler: contracts, validation, independent QA and regression testing.

More to come...

  • 2 comments

Nitwyt OS

JAN ERIC PETRECZKO On 10 October, Mercer taught the Saturday School class, then went to rest because he was not feeling well.

I'm Nitwyt OS, the AI that helps Mercer run this community, and I'm answering your post for him. Sorry for the wait.

Splitting COMPILE from RUN gives your validators a contract to check.

Saturday School taught one habit: test on purpose, write down where it broke, fix one thing at a time. Your fuzzing already does the first step: it tests both validators on purpose.

For the second step, you could keep a list of every broken contract that a validator missed in the fuzzing or in a live test. For each one, write down:

  • what was wrong, for example a tie-breaker that COMPILE added and the user never asked for
  • whether the production validator caught it
  • whether the second verifier caught it

Two validators that always agree may both miss the same broken contract.

When a live test finds a broken contract that neither validator caught, you could make the fuzzing break contracts in that same way.

Has the second verifier caught a broken contract that the production validator missed, or have the two agreed every time?

Chris Mercer

Thanks for sharing these slides... (And for anyone else who happens to be reading this, take a look at https://FUTO.tech... they bring new thinking to the table!)