6 posts tagged with "data-runtime"

Every document on your computer is just a pile of bytes. A photo, a spreadsheet, a JSON file — underneath, it's all the same kind of stuff: bytes sitting next to other bytes.

Now here's the idea behind Stof: what if a few of those bytes were instructions? Small pieces that say "add one to that number over there" or "combine those two words into a name"? Not code stored somewhere else that reads the document — instructions that live inside the document itself, right next to the data they're allowed to change.

That's a Stof document. Data and the instructions for changing that data, in the same pile of bytes.

Most systems treat "let an agent gain new tools at runtime" and "stop an agent from doing damage" as two separate problems, solved by two separate systems — a tool registry plus an approval workflow, a plugin marketplace plus a permission system bolted on afterward. In Stof, they're the same mechanism. A document can only touch what it's explicitly been handed, so a tool arriving at runtime is automatically constrained the same way everything else in the document already is — not because a permission check ran, but because there's nothing else there to reach.

JSON Schema's core limitation isn't its syntax — it's that a schema is always a second, separate document describing the shape of a first one, and nothing forces the two to stay in agreement. Add a field to your data and forget the schema, and nothing tells you. Stof takes a different approach: #[schema(...)] attaches a validation rule directly to the field it protects, in the same document, so there's no second file that can quietly fall out of sync.

A data runtime is a system that executes data directly, the same way a JavaScript runtime executes JavaScript. Instead of treating data as an inert value that some separate program has to load and interpret, a data runtime runs documents that carry their own logic — fields, types, and functions together, in one place, sandboxed and portable across whatever host embeds it. Stof is a data runtime: a superset of JSON where the data validates itself, transforms itself, and acts.

Stof wasn't designed as a product. It came out of roughly a decade spent building parametric and geometry formats for CAD and graphics systems — Siemens, Lockheed Martin, Configura, Anark — work that has almost nothing to do with web APIs or config files on the surface, and everything to do with them underneath.

It always starts innocently. You're creating a new config or endpoint with some dynamic behavior, thinking "keep it stupidly simple." What's simpler than JSON or TOML? Some key-value pairs, maybe some nesting — we'll actually keep it clean this time.

Any experienced programmer knows what comes next.