Developers Independently Converge on Markdown Contracts to Stabilize AI Agents

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A developer who published a 'Contract-Based Design' guide in April 2025 found striking parallels with AI researcher Andrej Karpathy's later 'LOOPS.md' technical notes, which also advocate negotiating structured contracts before agents execute tasks. Both approaches independently settled on local markdown files stored on disk as a mechanism to define inputs, outputs, and boundaries between AI agents before any code is written. The practical developer's goal was speed and parallel execution, allowing frontend and backend agents to work concurrently using a shared contract, while Karpathy's framework prioritizes reliability during long, unattended autonomous runs. In Karpathy's model, a generator and evaluator agent negotiate assertions via markdown until agreement is reached, preventing models from evaluating their own output and reducing drift. The convergence of a ground-up engineering solution with a research-oriented framework suggests contract-based coordination is emerging as a structural standard in multi-agent AI system design.

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