Colored Petri Nets, LLMs, and Distributed Applications
Summary
Explores colored Petri nets (CPNs) as an extension of Petri nets that attach data to tokens, enabling formal verification for concurrent LLM-enabled software. The article discusses practical patterns (guards, multi-token transitions) and potential architectures (Postgres-based vs in-memory Rust with persistence) to build scalable, correct distributed applications, with examples like web scraping schedulers and databuild. It argues that a CPN-based framework could bring compile-time guarantees, simulation capabilities, and safer concurrency for complex systems.