Stop Telling Agents How — Dan Barrett, Raymond Weitekamp & Jose Montes de Oca, OpenProse

Say what you want, not how to get it. The OpenProse team shows how to write multi-agent workflows as declarative contracts in plain markdown, which any harness (Claude Code, Codex and others) can compile and run. Demos include event-driven jobs triggered by webhooks and pull requests, a "grumpy senior" PR reviewer, and an end-to-end bank model-documentation workflow. They also discuss composing contracts, pinning a winning run into a reusable workflow, and how this compares to DSPy. Chapters: - 00:00 From prompt engineering to declaring intent - 05:40 What OpenProse is - 09:58 Agents, skills and contracts - 12:13 Event-driven jobs: contract + trigger - 18:52 Demo: run.prose.md - 24:43 Benchmarking every run against a contract - 27:01 OpenProse vs DSPy - 33:33 Demo: bank model documentation - 41:49 Composing contracts - 48:23 Q&A Dan Barrett — X: https://x.com/irl_danb | https://prose.md Raymond Weitekamp — https://prose.md Jose Montes de Oca — https://prose.md Join us in SF for the second annual AIE CODE summit: https://aie.codes our last flagship summit of 2026. Applications live now!