I invented a DSL for governance. Then I killed it.

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Signal was

I spent a few days developing a notation system for governance rules in an agentic engineering project. It looked like this:

FOOTGUN high_on_own_supply :=
  L12.creativity & L9.sycophancy -> positive_feedback_loop
  BRAKE: bearing_check(NORTH)                                   [L9, L12]

The claim was 4.5:1 compression over verbose prose. The operators (:=, ->, |, &, !) were meant to communicate logical relationships more efficiently than natural language.

It decoded well. Claude scored 6/6 on comprehension. GPT-4 scored 8/8 on reasoning. I had a proof of concept and I was genuinely proud of it. Which is probably why I didn’t test the obvious alternative.

Signal on oceanheart.ai

I invented a DSL for governance. Then I killed it.

What Signal was