Practitioner
William Waites
William Waites is a researcher and operator developing formal methods for multi-agent AI coordination, author of the Artificial Organisations framework and creator of the Plumbing typed language for agent protocol specification.
Signal
William Waites works at the intersection of formal methods and multi-agent AI systems. His 2026 paper "Artificial Organisations" (arXiv:2602.13275) proposes institutional design — structural constraints and information compartmentalization — as the appropriate foundation for reliable multi-agent behaviour. He is the creator of the Plumbing typed language and is associated with Leith Document Company Limited, a Scottish firm that operates a production multi-agent document system built on the same architectural principles.
Context
The operator pattern Waites represents is unusual in the current AI ecosystem: bringing formal methods (session types, type theory) to bear on agent coordination problems that most practitioners address informally. Plumbing implements session types — a well-established technique from distributed systems — for specifying protocols between AI agents, with compile-time verification of agent graph well-formedness. The companion production system at Leith Document Company demonstrates that these methods are not merely theoretical.
Relevance
Waites models a rigorous, structurally-grounded approach to multi-agent AI reliability at a moment when the field is producing frameworks faster than it is producing correctness guarantees. The institutional design thesis — that the unit of trust should be the organisation, not the agent — is a coherent alternative to the dominant alignment-first paradigm and is directly implementable with existing tools.
Current State
Active researcher and operator. Leith Document Company is operational. Plumbing is in first public release (March 2026). The arXiv paper is available for citation.
Open Questions
- How does the institutional design approach scale beyond three-agent systems?
- What is the relationship between session type verification and runtime failures not captured at compile time?
- How does the Leith Document Company production system evolve as the Plumbing language matures?
Connections
Waites is the practitioner most directly connected to the artificial-organisations circuit. His dual role as researcher and operator — building the formal tools and running production systems on them — distinguishes him from purely theoretical contributions to the multi-agent reliability question.