The VERA Book

VERA (Virtual Executable Representation for Agents) is a virtual assembly language designed for AI agents to generate directly, bypassing traditional programming languages. It compiles to native machine code.

Why VERA?

Traditional programming inverts the wrong way for an AI-native world:

Human writes → High-level language → Compiler → Machine code

VERA flips this:

Agent writes → VERA Text → Machine code
                   ↓
   Human reads ← VERA Explain

The agent is the primary author. The human is the reviewer. VERA provides two representations to serve this model:

Key Properties

• ~80 instructions across 14 categories, using full English words (add, subtract, compare_equal, branch_if)
• Named slots instead of registers — the compiler decides physical storage
• Explicit types on every instruction via dot suffix (.i64, .f32, .ptr)
• No structured control flow — only jumps, labels, and two-target branches
• Portable — one source representation targets multiple architectures
• Self-contained binaries — static linking, no runtime dependencies

Positioning

VERA occupies a specific niche between existing representations:

• More abstract than native assembly — no registers, no platform specifics
• Lower level than WebAssembly — no structured control flow requirement, flat memory
• Simpler than LLVM IR — no SSA form, no phi nodes, no undefined behavior
• More LLM-friendly than all of the above — full English words, explicit types everywhere

What's Included

Standard Library (vera:*)

9 modules providing portable building blocks — I/O, memory, strings, math, networking, threading, DNS resolution, environment variables, and binary encoding. Some use compiler primitives for OS access; others are pure VERA with zero primitives.

Packages (pkg:*)

4 community packages built entirely on the standard library — HTTP client/server, JSON parsing/serialization, and a PostgreSQL wire protocol driver.

Toolchain