Adama core: the language and the living-document runtime

Nov 2024 – Apr 2026 · age 42–44

What it was

The compiler and runtime at the heart of Adama. A hand-written parser read a language of records, tables, privacy modifiers, reactive formulas, labelled state machines, channels that wait for people and, from 2026, AI agents. A type checker enforced who may see what, and about thirty code generators emitted Java compiled inside the running process. In the runtime every value wrote a forward and a reverse delta on each change, a goodwill budget of ten million loop checks bounded each transaction, the random source was persisted so history replayed exactly, and each viewer received only the changes they were allowed to see. Hundreds of Adama programs served as gold tests, checked byte for byte against saved transcripts.

Wins, for the age

• Lazy per-viewer deltas, found in 2019, where a viewer denied everything receives nothing at all: five years ahead of Electric and Zero (2024).
• Every value writes its own undo, arrived at concurrently with Immer's patches and inverse patches (2018), from a board game rather than a state library.
• At forty-four, Jeff added AI agents as a transactional reactive type, an idea with no popular equivalent yet.
• Gold transcripts caught hundreds of failed compiles in one refactor before a commit. One primate, refactoring a compiler without fear.

What it taught

• Bound compute, persist entropy, write the inverse. Three runtime rules gave billing, replay, undo and abort from one mechanism.
• Privacy in the type system is also the efficiency story. The lazy delta writer is where the two meet.
• A gold corpus is what lets a solo compiler author refactor.
• Concatenated Java strings are a weak intermediate representation, and became a debt.

Genealogy

Ancestors: Career Facebook: streaming updates to huge audiences. Evolution eXPeriment: one shared world held by a server. Kitchen: a schema compiler and a scripting VM. Lamancha I: undo as JSON deltas. Lamancha II: the language and runtime themselves. OldSkool: reactive formulas in miniature. osgOpenGEL: an error that remembers where it has been. Play Workspace: a JSON document per game over a log. Vector Register: generating Java wholesale. World Bootstrap: undo and redo as diffed data. Descendants: none on record. Its ideas went out through the farewell, itemised for anyone to take. Part of: Adama.

Epitaph

A document that could not compile if it leaked, could not loop forever, could not forget its dice, and could undo anything it did, including what its AI agents said.