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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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