That’s exactly what I’m getting at. LLMs have abstracted computation itself. In fact LLMs are a step back from computation. They are in essence a state machine. A prompt goes in and a response comes out. CANONIC is a language to extend that across a tree of governance towards a complex gated state machine that must be compliant. https://hadleylab.org/blogs/2025-12-29-the-compiler-insight/
The only thing missing from the system is the AI GOV that defines the specification of work. Once that is commonplace developers become ephemeral as the code to support the hardened GOV. That is what CANONIC.org is.
Let the LLM write the software. That’s ephemeral and evolves with time. Humans should govern the entire system to resilience. That is fixed with time. Thou shalt not kill has staying power. Weapons, poison, and other methods of death evolve. More governence deals with them over time.
your LLM prompt is, by definition, underspecified. the code is what describes the actual behaviour of the system, and there are known and understood ways to make that behaviour more robust, correct and resilient, that are independent of the domain the code is modelling, but consistent across different code bases. that's why I say writing code is its own domain.
as an analogy, an art museum couldn't paint their own paintings to hang up (or at least they would not be very good) but neither would monet or picasso have done a particularly good job at designing a space to let millions of people a year view their pictures. both skills are necessary to the overall product.
Indeed it’s both. Once humans start governing their AI. Once the blockchain community can check the GOV contract for validity. Founder of One becomes a reality. Contracts are institutional memory!
The wording in the posted article, which is elevator-pitch. The audience has money, ambitious, mercenary attitude, and proximity to big problem that must be either solved or resold.
Rather, humans involved have looked at this problem and in a few cases succeeded. And in many cases, shelved it and returned to process cardiology, Ugandan infrastructure, etc.
Oh boy is right. If BITCOIN is SPECulation to distribute cryptographic transactions on a blockchain pre AI, CANONIC is a SPECification to distribute WORK contracts with your AI on a blockchain. So BITCOIN=SPECulation. While CANONIC COIN=SPECification… of WORK!
This is partially true. Thanks for the comment. I’m the developer of CANONIC. It’s an AI GOV framework. But crypto it is not. The opposite.
CANONIC is a learning language to fully govern AI. Ask yourself why you are still programming computation with LLMs when they repeatedly outperform humans on such coding tasks. What’s missing is AI GOV. CANONIC is a contract with your AI. COIN becomes an artifact of good AI governence. Hardly an opaque transaction. :)
It’s a tortured metaphor for benefit or value or bounty. So, to work with the cardiologist, she publicly issues a bounty (numerator) in COIN and I privately estimate the effort denominator. Triage the table of bounties by this fraction.
I guess it could also be used to communicate that some problems are too difficult for modest resources, if the reward exceeds 255.
Anyway, the only thing worth spending it on is resource upgrades, right?
Author here. The blog argues that the real story from Anthropic's hackathon isn't that domain experts can build AI (they can) but that hackathon demos and production systems require fundamentally different things. A permit app that works on demo day and a permit system that survives when California revises the code, when the builder leaves, when a municipality asks for an audit trail — those are different problems. We're building a governance framework (CANONIC — CANONIC.org) where every AI capability is declared in a versioned contract. Curious what HN thinks about the gap between "domain expert can build" and "institution can trust what they built."
That's interesting, it reminds me of something we've realized internally at my company, AI coding is best used with strict adherence to requirements and tests (potentially generated by AI), reviewed by a human developer
Indeed. CLAUDE.md is a linear memory for agents. Hardly the structure for multi orchestration requires for agenetic programming today. CANONIC is a learning language to customize agents across your governance tree. Ever internal node is an opportunity to govern intelligence which completely redefines what agents can do, how they communicate and the overall sophistication of fleet orchestration.
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