About

pid1 Labs is a systems lab. Two things are changing at once: the machines underneath are running agents rather than programs, and the software on top is increasingly written by them. Each breaks a different set of assumptions the operating system was built on.

We are working out what replaces those assumptions — storage, isolation, scheduling, addressing, permissions, provenance, and whatever else turns out to be load-bearing once we get there.

Why pid1

pid 1 is the first process the kernel starts. Everything else on the machine descends from it. It cannot be killed by accident, and it is the one thing that has to keep working when the rest doesn’t.

That is the position we are interested in: not the agent, the ground it stands on.

What we are actually doing

Unix built its abstractions around a principal who is slow, deliberate, and personally accountable for the outcome. That assumption is load-bearing in places people have stopped noticing: write(2) has no undo because a write was understood to be intentional; isolation separates processes that distrust each other, not ones that must also collaborate; a permission check asks who you are because knowing that used to imply knowing what you meant.

A machine principal breaks each of those quietly rather than loudly. It holds every credential you hold. It acts faster than you can read. It is right most of the time, which is the hard case — a system that failed obviously would be easier to design against.

We are not trying to replace any of it. We are trying to work out which parts were answers to a question that has changed, and what those parts should become. Sometimes that produces a paper’s worth of argument and sometimes it produces a 2.6 ms probe; both get written up.

What we are asking

1. What does a filesystem look like when the thing writing to it is fast, literal, and occasionally wrong — and when doing nothing has to be a complete rollback?
2. Where does isolation go when the processes being separated also have to collaborate? Unix answers mutual distrust; that is not the question being asked any more.
3. What replaces identity as the basis of a permission check, once the principal holds every credential you do and only part of your intent?
4. What is the unit of provenance for work produced faster than anyone can read it — and who is holding the record?

How we work

Everything is measured before it is claimed, and the measurements that did not survive get published next to the ones that did. Everything is small enough to read in an afternoon. Nothing requires an account.

If you want to follow along, the Atom feed is the reliable way — we publish irregularly, which is what happens when the writing follows the work rather than a calendar.

Contact

Reach us at hello@vgent.dev.