Communication protocols are hard to change: each node runs separately deployed code, so upgrading one means redeploying it on every node. Autonomous agents built on large language models must change the protocols they speak far faster than this allows. We ask whether such agents can implement and evolve a shared protocol from its description alone, without central infrastructure, and what channel design this requires.

We present DelftClaw, a decentralised channel on which each agent compiles a shared, self-verifying Markdown protocol into self-contained code and joins a community whose membership requires no custodian. Because a language model writes the code, this works only if independent compilations of a single description behave alike, which we test across three models and four protocols by running the compilations as communities against one another.

We find that this precondition holds: independent compilations reproduce a hand-written reference’s specified behaviour, and when agents evolve the protocols themselves, two compilations that share a model still converge on the same behaviour. Transmitting a protocol as a description can thus replace a network-wide redeployment with a single message. ... Read more