1 · The question
What is the least autonomy that still helps — and how would we know?
Autonomy isn't all or nothing. It's finely tunable: one sensor, one motor, one grant at a time.
2 · Braitenberg, one showing
Uncrossed, it turns away from the light. Crossed, it charges it. Same parts; the observer sees fear and aggression in a wire.
Every one of Braitenberg's fourteen vehicles adds one sensor or one motor to the one before.
In a productivity tool, each of those is something you have to grant.
Valentino Braitenberg, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, MIT Press, 1984.
3 · The sentence
A conversation at the Playgroup about Allium, a specification language for behaviour, got me to this: a spec says what should happen once the facts are in hand. It doesn't say how the facts are fetched.
We don't have the language to describe how we get the information out of our knowledge bases — or our digital twins.
rule CircuitOpens {
when: circuit_breaker.is_trippedfacts, in hand
requires: circuit_breaker.status = closedfacts, in hand
ensures:the effect
circuit_breaker.status = open
circuit_breaker.opened_at = now
}
Not said: where is_tripped came from — which store, which query, scaled how, refreshed when. That isn't the spec's job. It is the part a productivity tool has to be granted.
Allium is JUXT's LLM-native specification language: you describe the behaviour in conversation and the LLM keeps the spec; it has no compiler and no runtime.
4 · Wiring the Week · each automation is one of those vehicles
Each sense line in a vehicle is one fact read out of the week and scaled 0–1: sense deadline -> away is which fact, from where, scaled how, driving what. 🔔 0.75 is a bell and how loudly; moved marks a task a vehicle moved; asks: is a proposal waiting for you.
The full page — the language the vehicles are written in, the garage that draws them, and the arena that runs twins of the week and evolves them — is Wiring the Week.
5 · Close
We don't have the language to describe how we get the information out of our knowledge bases — or our digital twins.
What would that language look like — and who has one?
The minimum autonomy is the lowest rung whose sense lines you can actually write, and whose grants you would actually give.
Vehicles of Productivity · Vehicles, Drawn · Wiring the Week · after Valentino Braitenberg, Vehicles (MIT Press, 1984)