Research Agenda

Motivation

New use cases, architectures, and hardware arrive faster than teams can integrate them. The bottleneck is human capacity. Our goal: compress Time to Integrate (TTI) from months to days. We lay out the full agenda in our whitepaper.

Approach

Self-Defining Systems (SDS) uses scalable agency: agents that expand with available compute and explore thousands of design hypotheses in parallel. The workflow refines a spec through successive stages, backtracking when downstream results expose flaws.

SpecHigh-level goals and constraints
ArchitectureModule decomposition and interfaces
AlgorithmsAlgorithmic choices for each module
CodeRunnable implementation
Deployed systemRunning system, monitored and refined
Parallel hypotheses at each stage
Backtrack on downstream flaws

Roadmap · five phases of autonomy

01

Self-configuring

Tune parameters against objectives.
02

Self-assembling

Compose systems from modular components.
03

Self-creating

Generate and evaluate novel components.
04

Self-designing

Architect systems from specs.
05

Self-managing

Improve the design process itself.

Research challenges

Agentic workflow

Scaling agent populations as exploration load changes.

Specification

Expressing multi-dimensional objectives precisely enough for agents to make the right tradeoffs.

Architecture search

Generating sound hypotheses from a vast design space while avoiding subtle regressions.

Hypothesis rejection

Pruning the search space early with multi-fidelity evaluation.

Verification and deployment

Arguing for correctness before deployment and reusing artifacts when specs change.

Ongoing work

We are developing the Self-Defining Operator (SDO): agents that deploy and operate production systems, with a persistent knowledge base that accumulates operational experience across sessions.