Introduction

This book explains what dont is, why it exists, and where the authoritative project sources live.

dont is a proposed command-line tool for autonomous LLM harnesses.

Its job is narrow and opinionated: stop an agent from turning ungrounded text into asserted project truth.

In the surrounding tool ecology (these auxiliary tracking tools are used in this repo, but aren’t prerequisites for understanding dont):

• wai helps track workflow and design intent
• bd tracks concrete work
• dont governs epistemic discipline

This book is the reader-friendly front door for the project. It does not replace the fuller OpenSpec decomposition or the archived monolithic draft in wai research. Instead, it explains the problem the tool is meant to solve and points to the deeper source material in the repository, especially the tracked research notes under .wai/projects/dont/research/. These notes are part of the project’s workflow and research record managed with wai.

Read this book if you want to know

• what dont is for
• why ordinary “please double-check yourself” prompting is not enough
• how the project’s research maps onto the proposed tool

Key sources

(Note: External links point to the main branch of the repository.)

• OpenSpec change specs (openspec/changes/*/specs/)
• Research: forcing doubt in minds and machines
• Research: designing doubt into AI interaction
• Repository README