spaced repetition prompts - blog section 10 - Nondeterministic Idempotence

^ spaced repetition prompts - blog section 10 - Nondeterministic Idempotence

Blog Post -- Section 10 - Nondeterministic Idempotence

How does NDI differ from Temporal's approach to durable execution? ? Temporal uses deterministic, durable replay. Gas Town achieves durability and guaranteed execution through completely different, nondeterministic machinery.

What makes Molecule workflows computationally complete? ? They can have complex shapes, loops, and gates — making them Turing-complete.

Why are agents less likely to make mistakes when following Molecules? ? They're not managing their own TODO list — they only handle a single, small step at a time, with acceptance criteria already specified.
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Similar to a Ralph loop

What motivates agents to diligently check off Molecule steps, even trivial ones? ? They understand the bureaucracy updates a live activity feed and puts work on a permanent ledger.

What three things make molecular workflows durable in Gas Town? ? All three are Beads backed by Git: (1) the agent, (2) the hook, (3) the molecule itself.

What happens when a new session discovers the previous one crashed mid-step in a Molecule? ? It figures out the right fix, performs it, and moves on to the next step.

What does "nondeterministic" mean in NDI? ? The path taken is fully nondeterministic — agents may take different routes or even make mistakes — but the outcome is the same.

What does "idempotent" mean in NDI? ? The workflow eventually finishes with the intended outcome, "guaranteed," as long as you keep throwing agents at it.

How do Molecule acceptance criteria enable self-correction? ? If an agent makes a mistake, it can self-correct because the molecule's acceptance criteria specify what "done" looks like for each step.

Next section: section 11 - Wisps - Ephemeral Orchestration Beads

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