Thought Experiment #1

Yesterday evening I was at the first Thought Experiment, a new series of informal evenings on how "AI is changing the way we code, find vulnerabilities, and prove theorems". It was held at the Paris School of AI, which turns out to be a few hundred metres from the Tarides office, and it was cheerfully organised by Caterina Urban and Karthik Bhargavan, with whom we are sending formally verified post-quantum cryptography to space. Message sequence charts for agents Benedikt Bollig (CNRS, LMF) asked whether AI agents can be made to coordinate safely. I read his papers on message sequence charts (MSCs) during my PhD, when I was working on scenario languages built on the same formalism, so I was curious to see where he would take them twenty years later. The answer is agentic workflows. An MSC draws each participant as a lifeline and each message as an arrow between two of them, and that is a good fit for a system of agents: the message-passing structure around the LLM calls is where…