February 14, 2026
Color me skeptical
Colored Petri Nets, LLMs, and distributed applications
Can colored nets tame AI app chaos? Crowd asks: why not TLA+
TLDR: A developer proposes Colored Petri Nets to keep AI-driven, concurrent apps safe and verifiable. The comments immediately debate whether this belongs in TLA+, splitting into formal-methods purists vs Rust/tooling pragmatists, all asking for proofs, demos, and why not stick with tried-and-true database locks.
A dev pitched Colored Petri Nets—think flowcharts where smart “tokens” carry data—as a way to keep AI-powered apps and scrapers from tripping over each other. The promise: formal checks, fewer bugs, smoother concurrency. But the crowd’s first reaction? “Wait, isn’t this just TLA+?” That’s a formal language used to prove systems won’t break, and the comment thread instantly split into camps.
On one side: formal-methods fans waving the “don’t reinvent the wheel” flag, arguing you can model this with TLA+ and sleep better at night. On the other: Rust enthusiasts cheering the idea that CPNs map nicely to Rust’s “typestate” pattern (link) and could give LLM-built systems guardrails. Pragmatists rolled in with “just use SELECT FOR UPDATE” and keep scraping simple. Skeptics warned that teaching LLMs (large language models) to juggle tokens sounds like herding caffeinated cats.
Humor landed fast: jokes about “coloring inside the lines,” tokens as “Skittles,” and guards acting like bouncers. Meanwhile, the dev’s vision—CPNs handling resource leasing, cooldowns, and deadlock avoidance for scrapers—got curiosity points, especially with the CPN paper linked. The real drama: theory vs tooling, whiteboard proofs vs shipping code, with everyone demanding benchmarks and a demo before the hype goes full rainbow.
Key Points
- •Colored Petri Nets extend Petri nets by allowing tokens to carry data, enabling richer modeling of concurrent systems.
- •Petri nets with single-input/output transitions and a single global token are equivalent to finite state machines.
- •CPNs support guards and multi-token consumption/production, aiding correctness, coordination, and concurrency control.
- •A web scraping scenario is modeled using CPN semantics to coordinate leased proxies and prioritized targets, replacing SELECT FOR UPDATE-style leasing.
- •Rust’s typestate pattern aligns with CPN semantics, suggesting Rust as a viable platform for implementing CPN-based frameworks.