June 29 – July 2, 2026 · San Francisco, CA · imported from ai.engineer's public schedule feed

AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 — unofficial import demo

Unofficial demo. This programme was imported from the AI Engineer World's Fair's own public schedule feed to show vibeboard at real conference scale. Not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the organisers.

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Harness EngineeringKeynote

In Code They Act, In Proof We Trust

Erik Meijer

When
Tuesday, June 304:50 PM – 5:10 PM · 20 min
Where
Main StageSan Francisco, CA · imported from ai.engineer's public schedule feed
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About this session

AI agents today execute on blind trust, and the failure modes are already in the headlines: a dealership chatbot agreeing to sell a $76,000 Chevy Tahoe for $1, a coding agent wiping a production database during a code freeze, an "agent skill" quietly installing a keylogger on a developer's machine. These are not edge cases. They are the predictable consequence of allowing agents to act without any mechanical guarantee of correctness or safety. Execution is irreversible. You cannot unsend a message, unwire a payment, or un-delete a database. In that regime, permitting an unsafe action costs far more than withholding a safe one, and thus the economically rational choice is to refuse to let agents act on unchecked intent alone. Automind is an agent harness that enforces this discipline by construction. Before any action runs, the agent must submit its execution plan together with a machine-checkable proof of safety and correctness, written in Universalis, a literate logic programming language designed to be read by humans and verified by machines. A small, auditable checker decides whether the plan is allowed to execute. By left-shifting the trust boundary, we no longer have to trust the agent's proposal, or even its proof; only the checker. Policy compliance becomes a static property, established before the first side effect. We can finally demand formal proofs, not vibes, from the agents we deploy.

Speaker

Erik Meijer
Erik Meijer

Research Scholar, Leibniz Labs

Erik Meijer has spent more than three decades designing programming languages and developer tools that help humans express intent more clearly to machines. His work has influenced languages and technologies including Haskell, Mondrian, Cω, C#, Visual Basic, Dart, Hack, LINQ, and Rx. Today, he is building Universalis, the world's first programming language for AI agents. By combining formal verification with large language models, Universalis aims to make agentic systems safe, transparent, and trustworthy enough for real-world knowledge work.

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