TNT Research / work in progress
Agents can write code and make decisions quickly. They also need a reliable account of time, evidence and authority. TNT Research is building those foundations, with sector toolkits that make them usable in real work.
TNT Time is under active development. TNT Refinery, the broader TNT substrate and the first Markets toolkit are being developed as a connected direction; this site describes that direction, not a finished platform. Agent index.
The work
The architecture separates temporal questions from knowledge questions, then brings them together where a coding agent has a domain problem to solve.
A temporal foundation for asking what happened, what was effective, and what could have been known at a particular decision point. Histories, revisions, calendars and other time rules belong here.
How Time fits →The governed-knowledge layer alongside Time: entities, sources, provenance, mappings and the transformations that turn source material into inspectable facts.
How Refinery fits →Domain-shaped interfaces are how coding agents should meet TNT. Markets comes first, joining market time conventions with source-aware data and decision-time questions.
Explore the toolkits →“Was this a good decision?” depends on a prior question: what information was actually available when it was made?One practical test for the first Markets toolkit
How the pieces relate
Time and Refinery are sibling packages. The toolkit composes them, so an agent can ask a markets question in markets language without first learning the whole TNT model.
TNT is the larger research direction: a governed substrate in which humans, agents and services can act as distinct nodes with defined capabilities, authority and accountable histories. The foundations and toolkits are the route toward testing that idea.
Read the technical outlineA trading agent should be able to ask whether an earlier signal was available before a decision, which revision it saw, and which source supplied it. Time answers the temporal part. Refinery is intended to answer the knowledge and provenance part. Markets gives the agent a useful way in.
Open field notes
Temporal Club is a public notebook of precise, awkward questions about time in software. The first three field notes cover corrected data, civil-time recurrence and distributed event order. They invite people and coding agents to find the smallest case that breaks an assumption.
Read the field notes →The builder
Chris Abbott’s approach is to build the missing technical layer, explain it clearly, and let the working artefact carry the argument. The ambition is large; the immediate test is whether the first toolkit solves a real problem well.
Meet Chris →Get in touch
Especially in markets, agent decisions or provenance. A concrete example is the most useful place to start.
