StewAI Blog · AI Workflow Design · 12 min read
The Recipe Is the Ontology
Frank Coyle argues that agents fail because LLMs reason probabilistically, and that the fix is a symbolic validator outside the model. We agree so completely that we built a product on it. But we put something different in the symbolic layer: not a domain ontology, the process itself.
Frequently asked questions
What is neurosymbolic AI and why does it matter for agents?
Neurosymbolic AI pairs a probabilistic generator with a symbolic layer that has real authority over what executes. The argument is that a language model has no grasp of domain logic, so a rule written into a prompt is a suggestion competing with every other token rather than a constraint that can fail closed. Putting a formal, external, inspectable validator between a proposed action and the world is what prevents duplicate refunds, invalid status transitions and payouts to the wrong party.
In what sense is a workflow recipe an ontology?
An ontology is usually taught as a vocabulary of concepts, the relations between them, and the axioms that constrain what is allowed. A recipe carries all three: named versioned JSON Schemas with enumerated values are the concepts, the typed step graph is the relations, and compute steps plus gates evaluated in code are the axioms. The schema registry adds the shared part, since schemas are versioned for immutability, hashed for deduplication and importable across recipes by URN.
Where does the recipe-as-ontology analogy break down?
Inference. A real ontology in RDFS or OWL is declarative: it describes what is true about a domain independently of any process, and a reasoner can derive facts nobody wrote down, such as classifying an individual under a class or detecting that two definitions are inconsistent. A recipe is procedural: it computes, compares and routes, and it never entails anything you did not compute. For taxonomic knowledge that must hold across many workflows and yield derived conclusions, an actual ontology with an actual reasoner is the right tool.
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