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.
Harness Engineering sessions at AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco.
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
4:50 PM - 5:10 PM·20m
Main Stage
Capacity: 4000 attendees
Sign in to add this talk to your schedule.

Erik Meijer
Computer scientist and entrepreneur
Leibniz Labs
@headinthebox
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.