← back
The Prompt is the Platform - Dominik Tornow, Resonate HQ
Takeaway
Agents can help design reliable systems when abstract specifications are connected to implementation through precise simulation feedback.
Summary
- Resonate proposes shifting reuse from general-purpose platform implementations to abstract protocols that agents instantiate on existing infrastructure.
- Direct generation from an abstract specification produced happy-path code that failed under concurrency, process failures, and network faults.
- Adding concrete target-specific specifications made production implementation possible, but initially left humans responsible for most design decisions.
- For Resonate on NATS, deterministic simulation becomes executable design: agents explore algorithms under stale reads and partial failures, then derive concrete specifications and production code.
specification-drivendurable-executionsimulation
Original description
Coding agents challenge long-standing software engineering practices. Instead of using general-purpose libraries, frameworks, or platforms, agents synthesize bespoke systems on demand. In this talk, I'll show where agents fail, where agents succeed, and the workflow for making the specification the product and the prompt the platform. Speakers: Dominik Tornow (Resonate HQ, Inc): Dominik Tornow is the founder and CEO of Resonate and the author of Think Distributed Systems. He has spent more than 20 years designing and building distributed systems and now focuses on agentic engineering, formal modeling, and formal verification. X/Twitter: https://x.com/DominikTornow LinkedIn: / dtornow GitHub: https://github.com/dtornow