Three Small Things Last Week: Agent Ledgers, Interfaces, and Rooms

Several AI engineering efforts last week converged on the same bottleneck: agents forget, collide, and can't touch the physical world. Security researcher Jordy Zomer open-sourced Lemmalog, splitting agent memory into a probabilistic front-end for fact extraction and a deterministic Datalog engine for causal reasoning and cascading retraction. Anthropic and Janelia unveiled the Model Hardware Standard, letting LLMs control lab instruments via natural-language labels while hard-coding safety limits in driver firmware—a lesson learned after Claude mistook liquid foaming for a software error at Genentech. Startup Raft blamed multi-agent chaos on the room, not the models, identifying a reasoning-commit gap where agents act on stale snapshots; their fix includes draft holding, pull-based inboxes, and silence as a valid action. Anthropic also formalized Fermat's Last Theorem in 11 days, but early multi-agent attempts collapsed until the team moved to the Prove2Me dependency-graph platform. All four stories share one pattern: wrapping probabilistic models in deterministic engineering scaffolds. Lemmalog scored just 0.128 on preference tasks, MHS figures are all self-reported with no public spec, and Raft's scale claims lack third-party discussion—discount these numbers for now.

Why it matters: Three stories converge on the same agent engineering bottleneck; Lemmalog's causal ledger has concrete implementation and open-source code. But this is a personal blog roundup, not a first-party release, and only Lemmalog gets detailed treatment — MHS and multi-agent parts are...