About 15 years ago I was locked up in SF (850 Bryant/HoJ 7th floor) and everyone was talking about their "jobs"; like what they did for a living outside of the obvious. I said "I fuck with computers and shit" and I got some follow-up questions I did not expect like - "wtf you doing here", they were all along those lines. I been locked up plenty of times but this was the 1st time I was publicly ridiculed for it. This guy named Vic; big ass black dude with an extremely visible front tooth missing said: "Man, if I could do what you do I would rebuild the Gov." What followed was a discussion where everyone in the pod which not only showed interest and consensus but an abject disappointment in me and my choices so I said jokingly, well OK; if I am ever locked up w/ my computer I'll rebuild the Gov. Then Covid hit, i got fired from Goop and I found myself essentially "locked up w/ my computer". Here on HN; this is NOT a popular sentiment and I know it will garner nothing but admonishment in the form of downvotes and ridicule but I have really been able to help some people w/ housing, re-entry, healthcare, addiction etc... so fuck it.

Everyone in that pod agreed the Gov was broken. Nobody could put their finger on it or articulate in what AI might deem a "load bearing" - HHAHAH capacity. The other day i saw a comment on here by bob1029 [1] and he put it better than I ever could. It's broken because nobody can execute across all the moving parts; its a coordination issue in many ways - the cost of collaboration has become so large that it has become the thing to overcome instead of whatever first principal is the whole point of the shit e.g.: Healthcare, Food, Housing etc... The bottleneck was never intelligence it's coordination. The cost of getting many parties to act together without the whole thing blowing up.

The Anthropic multi-agent article hit it too...turf war, the 2.4M-request queue, the price collusion, the merge silos. Every one is the same thing: free-form runtime "negotiation" blowing up. And every success is an agent ad-hoc reinventing an institution mid-fight inventing a "verifiable criterion," writing an apology commit and pulling in a human, running a tournament as a commitment device. They keep hand-rolling the institution, badly, under fire.

So stop making them reinvent it. The generalization of the "constrained action space" idea isn't just bounding one agent's moves it's what I call an intent: intents don't just constrain each agent's actions, they codify the coordination itself.

And I make the unit of coordination a first-class object: the Deal a structured negotiation instead of a free-form one. The Deal is the container those agents keep reinventing, handed to them up front: scope and terms, the parties and their roles, the ordered steps, a verification gate as the neutral arbiter, and an appeal / human-escalation path as recourse, all over an append-only record. Agents negotiate inside a bounded contract instead of improvising one mid-fight.

How it works from what you say to what actually happens (the "Deal")

1. You speak the intent. You can use a form but I found people like the verbal shit much more.

2. Break the problem into an ontology. The ask gets decomposed into the real work it implies mapped to actual job roles (O*NET). Problem → Solution.

3. Vet the solution with the gov council agents. Every domain has one public AI expert in that agency's real systems Medicare, Medicaid, SSA, OPM (pda:codify.<domain>). Policies get deliberated and voted, elected officials in the loop, before anything runs. Stakeholders.

4. We staff it. It matches the specific expertise needed the exact specialty, not a generic "doctor." Down to the right role for your case.

5. We set up the financing. The money that follows the person eligibility, benefits, the payment rail. Financing.

6. An agent manages the process with expertise humans in the loop for anything high-risk, adjusting as outcomes come back, like an adaptive trial, until the outcome is met or it fails honestly. Expertise → Outcome.

The atomic unit of value here is a "Deal". Problem broken down, solution vetted, staffed, financed, executed under contract. intent → Deal → outcome.

Overview

- Intent: https://wiki.erpo.law/agent/wa-erpo

- Program: https://erpo.law/program/71069-petition-for-an-erpo-as-a-fam...

- Protocol: https://erpo.law/protocol/71079

I'm building it in the open because I think thats the only way this can be done

https://medicare.dev

https://epa.dev

etc...

Learning how to take criticism better so the more criticism the better.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49316271

/me inserts the "You're proposing a software solution to a social problem" copypasta form

Seriously, if the coordination problem you've identified isn't solved by the instantaneous global communications tech that we've had for between thirty and a hundred years (depending on how you count), it's a people problem that's not going to be solved by more tech. Notice how everything except maybe steps six and three in your plan require people to agree on the nature of the problem, whether it is a problem that even should be solved, and how many resources to commit to solving it. Getting people to agree to solve problems that need to be solved -even in the cases where solving those problems makes them personally worse off- is the blocker. Your use of shiny new software tools does nothing to remove that blocker.