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A lawyer won Anthropic's hackathon – what everyone missed

hadleylab.org

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Re: A lawyer won Anthropic's hackathon – what everyone missed

#11

Post by timosterhus »

It will be interesting to see what happens when more individuals with legitimate expertise in two or more non-software fields build tools that rely upon that intersection of deep, specific knowledge. I wonder how long it will take for AI to really begin encouraging a pursuit of generalist-style learning, as opposed to the specialist inclination that's ingratiated into nearly all formal institutions.

That's maybe not what the author was getting at, but that's what I came away with anyway.

Re: A lawyer won Anthropic's hackathon – what everyone missed

#13

Post by idrdex »

toraway wrote: post #5

This appears to be an advertisement for a (somewhat inscrutable) AI product they're selling called CANONIC, that also has a cryptocoin bolted on to it somehow.

This is partially true. Thanks for the comment. I’m the developer of CANONIC. It’s an AI GOV framework. But crypto it is not. The opposite.

CANONIC is a learning language to fully govern AI. Ask yourself why you are still programming computation with LLMs when they repeatedly outperform humans on such coding tasks. What’s missing is AI GOV. CANONIC is a contract with your AI. COIN becomes an artifact of good AI governence. Hardly an opaque transaction. :)

https://hadleylab.org/blogs/2026-02-23-coin-for-humans/

Re: A lawyer won Anthropic's hackathon – what everyone missed

#14

Post by idrdex »

kombookcha wrote: post #8
toraway wrote: post #5

This appears to be an advertisement for a (somewhat inscrutable) AI product they're selling called CANONIC, that also has a cryptocoin bolted on to it somehow.

Oh boy, if it's powered by AI /AND/ the blockchain, you know it's gonna be legit ;)

Oh boy is right. If BITCOIN is SPECulation to distribute cryptographic transactions on a blockchain pre AI, CANONIC is a SPECification to distribute WORK contracts with your AI on a blockchain. So BITCOIN=SPECulation. While CANONIC COIN=SPECification… of WORK!

https://hadleylab.org/blogs/2026-02-23-coin-for-humans/

Re: A lawyer won Anthropic's hackathon – what everyone missed

#15

Post by idrdex »

InfiniteRand wrote: post #10
idrdex wrote: post #2

Author here. The blog argues that the real story from Anthropic's hackathon isn't that domain experts can build AI (they can) but that hackathon demos and production systems require fundamentally different things. A permit app that works on demo day and a permit system that survives when California revises the code, when the builder leaves, when a municipality asks for an audit trail — those are different problems. W…

That's interesting, it reminds me of something we've realized internally at my company, AI coding is best used with strict adherence to requirements and tests (potentially generated by AI), reviewed by a human developer

Indeed. CLAUDE.md is a linear memory for agents. Hardly the structure for multi orchestration requires for agenetic programming today. CANONIC is a learning language to customize agents across your governance tree. Ever internal node is an opportunity to govern intelligence which completely redefines what agents can do, how they communicate and the overall sophistication of fleet orchestration.

Re: A lawyer won Anthropic's hackathon – what everyone missed

#16

Post by idrdex »

g8oz wrote: post #6

The AI editing of the article makes it a painful read. A shame because the point they were making is a good one, regarding AI coding apps empowering domain experts.

AI editing? It is completely governed by AI. I thought that was obvious. What’s the problem?

Re: A lawyer won Anthropic's hackathon – what everyone missed

#17

Post by idrdex »

becomevocal wrote: post #3

Simplifying here… sounds like essentially the split between (great) product managers and engineers We need both! Hurrah

Indeed it’s both. Once humans start governing their AI. Once the blockchain community can check the GOV contract for validity. Founder of One becomes a reality. Contracts are institutional memory!

Re: A lawyer won Anthropic's hackathon – what everyone missed

#18

Post by idrdex »

zem wrote: post #7
becomevocal wrote: post #3

Simplifying here… sounds like essentially the split between (great) product managers and engineers We need both! Hurrah

to put it another way, writing resilient software is a domain of its own and software engineers are it's domain experts.

Let the LLM write the software. That’s ephemeral and evolves with time. Humans should govern the entire system to resilience. That is fixed with time. Thou shalt not kill has staying power. Weapons, poison, and other methods of death evolve. More governence deals with them over time.

Re: A lawyer won Anthropic's hackathon – what everyone missed

#19

Post by idrdex »

eithed wrote: post #9
roxolotl wrote: post #4

> The hackathon winners understood something that most developers do not: the hard part of building useful AI is not the code, it is knowing what the system should do in the first place. This has always been true of all systems. Not that it isn’t an insight though since I don’t think enough people seem to get it. To build a system, with an LLM or without, you must know what the system needs to do. If you define it in…

Agree - domain experts lack the expertise on how things should be built. Developers lack the expertise of what should be built. In each case, one can get into the role of the other, per what you say: "humans who do the translation between those who deeply understand a system and software". LLMs will extrapolate for both (whether it's good or bad)

The only thing missing from the system is the AI GOV that defines the specification of work. Once that is commonplace developers become ephemeral as the code to support the hardened GOV. That is what CANONIC.org is.

Re: A lawyer won Anthropic's hackathon – what everyone missed

#20

Post by idrdex »

timosterhus wrote: post #11

It will be interesting to see what happens when more individuals with legitimate expertise in two or more non-software fields build tools that rely upon that intersection of deep, specific knowledge. I wonder how long it will take for AI to really begin encouraging a pursuit of generalist-style learning, as opposed to the specialist inclination that's ingratiated into nearly all formal institutions. That's maybe not…

That’s exactly what I’m getting at. LLMs have abstracted computation itself. In fact LLMs are a step back from computation. They are in essence a state machine. A prompt goes in and a response comes out. CANONIC is a language to extend that across a tree of governance towards a complex gated state machine that must be compliant. https://hadleylab.org/blogs/2025-12-29-the-compiler-insight/
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