Protocol-Driven Development: Governing AI-Generated Code Through Invariants

A new paper on arXiv introduces Protocol-Driven Development (PDD), a model for governing automatically generated software. PDD shifts the primary artifact from implementation code to a machine-enforceable protocol defined as a triplet (S, B, O) specifying structural, behavioral, and operational invariants. This approach aims to solve the governance problem introduced by automated program synthesis, where natural-language specifications and example-based tests are insufficient control boundaries. The paper argues that PDD defines an admissible implementation space, treating implementations as replaceable realizations discovered through synthesis.