Refinement-oriented programming
If an AI agent can produce a thousand changes an hour, the unit of work can no longer be "the change". Softanza's answer is a paradigm, an implementation under way, and a book.
The paradigm, in three sentences
Refinement-oriented programming is one meta-paradigm governing three first-class refinement domains: code, interface and data. The machinery is shared across all three: the refinement as the unit, the cascade as validation, the gate as the canonical writer, the audit chain as provenance, authority as permission, reversibility built in. Every non-trivial project produces all three kinds of artefact and most projects fail at the seams between them; the cascade crosses the boundaries so the seams become tractable.
The four words
A refinement is a single, deliberate change made typed, validated, attributed and reversible: like a commit, but checked against your specifications before it lands. The cascade is the full set of things a change affects, computed before it commits. The gate decides: a change that breaks a declared rule cannot land; it is refused structurally, not merely flagged. The audit chain records author, authority, rule and verdict as a by-product of the work, so "who decided this three years ago" is a query.
The implementation
specification
A corpus of over a hundred specifications, an interactive prototype of the refinement environment, and the first module of a Zig engine. The repository is not public yet, and this site says so rather than promising a date.
The book
manuscript
Refinement-Oriented Programming, a manifesto for software in the agentic era, by Mansour Ayouni, first of the AYOUNI books: a manuscript of eighteen chapters and a coda, from "What broke" and "The unit changed" through "Writing loops, not prompts" and "Agents, and the rest of us" to "Honest boundaries". Version 0.1, 2026.
The Softanza way A refinement is judged before it lands, by a gate that reads your rules, and leaves a chain anyone can query. The bottleneck of the agentic age is review, and review becomes structure.