We built something like this by hand without much difficulty for a product concept. We'd initially used LangGraph but we ditched it and built our own out of revenge for LangGraph wasting our time with what could've simply been an ordinary python function.
Never again committing to any "framework", especially when something like Claude Code can write one for you from scratch exactly for what you want.
We have code on demand. Shallow libraries and frameworks are dead.
i noticed the same, so in the README, I describe `cord` as a protocol:
```
This repo is one implementation of the Cord protocol. The protocol itself — five primitives, dependency resolution, authority scoping, two-phase lifecycle — is independent of the backing store, transport, and agent runtime. You could implement Cord with Redis pub/sub, Postgres for multi-machine coordination, HTTP/SSE instead of stdio MCP, or non-Claude agents. See RFC.md for the full protocol specification.
```
langchain is stuck in innovator dilemma - it was built for gpt 3.5, or 4, it needs a different design for todays models, but cant evolve because of existing users and backward compatibility
just like jQuery still exists and is being actively developed
The "impossibility" of enforcing legislated constraints on thousands of providers point is hand waving. We're all legislated to not harm each other. Throwing the small fraction who do in jail, is sufficient to keep the vast majority away from harming others, and there is also moral alignment.
If 10% of hosts (maybe even less) are penalized, the rest will likely start complying. much like self managed compliance of thousands of companies. A protocol is only as good as the entities that participate in the community using it.
If a company chooses a design and it can be proved through a subpoena of their communications that the design was intended and chosen for its addictive traits, even if there has been no evidence collected for the addictiveness, then the company (or person) can be deemed to have created a design in bad faith to society and penalized for it.
(Well that's my attempt. I tried to apply "innocent until proven guilty" here.)
Great point and many of the responses are very interesting too.
I wonder whether part of this is a habitualization of intolerance for just being with oneself - to be ok with feeling bored, for instance. Most suggestions are about "doing". Just being with oneself without a doing is painful for many from what I've seen.
I think it's what that intolerance leads to which is a big part of the problem. It's natural that we don't like being bored, but these days we have infinite means to keep boredom away that don't involve connecting with others. Why go through the risks and awkwardness of opening yourself up to others when you have a device of infinite rabbit holes and time sinks in your pocket at all times? 40 years ago it was very possible to run out of entertainment, which is quite different today.
This looks to me like partly a false dichotomy. We can design languages and write libraries. Some would even argue that some kinds of "libraries" could be viewed as languages themselves, as much as some languages might as well have been written as libraries in another language.
Also often, the language doesn't live isolated from its implementation (compiler or interpreter). While theory looks at languages via its semantics, in practice as the OP notes it is about the quality of the implementation and what can be reasonably done with the language.
A recent [1] case is Julia. I think it has hit a kind of sweet spot for language design where new performant code tends to get written in Julia rather than in some other language and bound to it. At its core, it is a simple "call functions, passing data in and getting results out" kind of language, but what the functions ("methods") mean and how the compiler does just-ahead-of-time compilation with deep type specialized code means you can write high level code that optimizes very well. Those mechanics operate under the hood though, which makes for a pleasant programming experience ... and there are loads of cutting edge packages being written in Julia. It is less interesting to look at Julia as "just the language".
[1] recent in programming languages is perhaps anything <= 15 years? .. because it takes time to discover a language's potential.
I find it hard to think of code as being the output of programming. I keep re-reading Naur's "Programming as theory building" paper and it still feels relevant and closer to how the activity feels to me, AI or no AI.
The frame set by the OP completely out me off and dissuaded me from reading the rest of the article beyond the first paragraph. Didn't feel like much throught was given to what was being said.
Apparently an elderly Irish musician said this as he was tuni g his instrument - "I've learnt that the secret to being happy is to not get personally involved in your own life."
You may find the "genailang" module fun to play with.
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