promise-theory

Promise Theory

Promise theory (Mark Burgess; formalized with Jan Bergstra) is a method of analysis for systems of autonomous agents — humans, LLM agents, APIs, and deterministic automation. It supplies the vocabulary for designing and diagnosing delegation: promises, acceptances, assessments, breaches, and renegotiation. This skill is a thin router; load the dense material only when a row in Load By Need matches your task.

Core model

A promise is an autonomous declaration of intended, but as yet unverified, behaviour from a promiser to a promisee (body: label Λ, type τ, constraint χ). Agents are autonomous: no agent can promise another's behaviour. Coordination emerges from voluntary cooperation — an offer plus an acceptance (a counter-promise) — never from imposed obligation. Obligations are derived, non-autonomous impositions (imposition + penalty). Agents keep promises via an evaluation loop: observe → assess → act, converging on the promised state. The Downstream Principle: the most downstream party in a promise chain carries the greatest causal responsibility for the outcome.

When to use

Load this skill when any of these triggers matches:

• Modeling delegation between humans and agents — decide who may promise what to whom, and who accepts, in a human + AI workforce.
• Designing capability manifests or agent contracts — declare capabilities and intent with acceptance criteria, verification, and withdrawal semantics.
• Diagnosing coordination failures — explain unkept promises, refused acceptances, or missing assessments in multi-agent work.
• Calibrating trust and verification — decide how much to verify an agent, at what rate, and at what cost.
• Designing self-healing or convergent infrastructure — evaluation loops that observe, assess, and act toward a desired state.
• Converting obligation-based designs to promise-based ones — replace push commands and mandates with voluntary offers and acceptance.

When not to use

• When enforceable centralized control is guaranteed — if you can command and verify compliance directly, promise theory's machinery is overhead, not insight.
• For simple single-agent prompting — one model and one prompt, with no delegation graph to model, needs no promise vocabulary.
• For imperative push-based orchestration scripts that need no consent modeling — a cron job or CI pipeline that runs without acceptance semantics is not a promise system.
• For legal contracts — promise theory is not contract law; it models voluntary intent and assessment, not enforceable legal instruments. Draft real contracts with legal counsel.
• When the user needs a specific tool manual — route to the tool's own skill (for example, cli-builder for CLI conventions) instead of framing the tool with promise theory.

Load By Need

Quick Start

Run these commands from the skill directory (promise-theory/); python3 scripts/promise-contract.py --help lists every command and flag.

1. Draft a promise manifest. Copy templates/promise-manifest.yaml.tmpl to a working file (for example promise-manifest.yaml) and fill the placeholders: agent ids and roles, at least one promise per agent (body, type, target), and at least one expectations entry whose about references a declared promise id.
2. Lint it. Run python3 scripts/promise-contract.py lint promise-manifest.yaml. Exit 0 with full expectation coverage means the manifest is valid; exit 1 names the violations to fix (coverage gaps, dangling acceptances, invalid enums) or reports a malformed file as a parse error — never a traceback. Re-run after each fix until clean.
3. Add --json for machine-readable output. Run python3 scripts/promise-contract.py lint promise-manifest.yaml --json to get a single JSON object on stdout (valid, errors, warnings, coverage, bindings) and nothing else.
4. Add --dry-run to confirm no writes. Run python3 scripts/promise-contract.py lint promise-manifest.yaml --dry-run to repeat the same check; lint is read-only, so nothing is written or modified.

Available Scripts

This skill bundles one script; there are no others to discover. Both commands are read-only (--dry-run is accepted everywhere as a no-op guard).

Append --json for machine-readable output (a single JSON object on stdout); render --json gives the same treatment to the graph summary.

Related Skills

Gotchas

1. Provenance honesty. The direct "promise theory + AI agents" literature is thin and recent (Burgess, "Cooperation in Human and Machine Agents," arXiv:2604.10505, 2026). In the references, claims not verified against a primary source carry [UNVERIFIED], and the promise-theory → LLM-agent synthesis is labeled EXTRAPOLATION. Preserve those markers; they are what keep this skill honest.
2. The theory is "semi-formal." The authors themselves use that term: there is a notation, definitions, lemmas, and rules, but no complete axiomatisation or model theory. The famous ≤50% (impositions) vs ≤100% (promises) claim is an informal heuristic, not a derived result. Use the formalism as a reasoning aid, not a proof system.
3. Autonomy is a modeling postulate, not an ideology. It does not claim decentralization is morally right or always better; it is chosen because it forces complete documentation of intended behaviour and exposes failure modes.
4. Promise-keeping must be stored as data. CFEngine's documented gap: it reported whether a promise was kept right now, but promise-keeping was never stored as data, so the evaluation loop was incomplete. In a hybrid workforce, record assessments as versioned data (a promise ledger) or trust cannot accumulate.
5. Verification loads are an attention/energy budget. The rate at which you check (kinetic mistrust) is spent attention; Burgess & Dunbar model it as a bounded budget. Budget verification cost explicitly and start unknown agents at 50-50 rather than assuming trust or distrust.

Prerequisites

• Python 3 with standard library only; promise-contract.py requires no third-party packages.
• A manifest to lint or render: copy templates/promise-manifest.yaml.tmpl and fill the placeholders (see Quick Start) before running either command.

Limitations

• The CLI validates declaration structure, enum values, expectation coverage, and dangling acceptances — it cannot judge whether the promised behaviour is sensible, achievable, or actually kept; assessments live in your promise ledger, not in this tool.
• Promise theory is not contract law: nothing the script validates creates an enforceable legal instrument (see When not to use).
• Lint is a static check at a point in time; it does not observe agents or verify runtime promise-keeping.

Exit Conditions

Stop when the delegation is modeled as a promise set, acceptances and assessments are recorded (or their absence explicitly deferred), and every breach has a renegotiation or escalation path. When diagnosing, stop after three non-converging passes and report the evidence instead of re-litigating the same promises.