03 · The alphabet

Nine chords and a pen.

Each structural token is a single gesture the band already recognises without calibration. Everything else, names and intents, you write on whatever surface is in front of you.

tap.doublefnTwo quick index taps against the thumb. Opens a function; the next written word is its name.
pinch.index{Index to thumb, release. Opens a block.
pinch.middle}Middle to thumb, release. Closes the block.
swipe.downintentThumb down across the side of the index finger. What you write next is the intent, as a string.
swipe.upverifyThumb up. The next written name is a check the agent must pass before it reports done.
swipe.rightallowGrants a capability for this function: net.read, fs.write, shell.
swipe.leftdenyRemoves a capability. Deny wins over allow.
roll.cwrunRoll the wrist clockwise. Compiles the named function and sends it to the agent.
roll.ccwundoRoll anticlockwise. Removes the last token. Roll twice to remove a whole statement.
writename · stringWrite with your index finger on a table, your leg, or the air. After intent it is a string; anywhere else it is a name. Decoded at roughly 21 words a minute today.

The mapping is fixed in the chord table and is not user-configurable, so a program written on one band reads the same on another. A decoder emits exactly one token per recognised discrete gesture: fn { } intent verify allow deny run undo.

Names and intents are written tokens. A handwriting segment begins when the decoder detects writing and ends when the pen lifts for longer than 600 ms or a gesture token is produced. After intent the text is a string, kept verbatim and trimmed; anywhere else it is a name — lower-cased, with internal whitespace replaced by ., so “tests pass” becomes tests.pass.

undo (anticlockwise wrist roll) is lexical: it removes the previous token and is itself discarded. Two consecutive undos remove the whole previous statement. Undo never appears in the text form. use is a keyword with no gesture; it appears only in .nl files.

A conforming decoder reports a confidence in [0, 1] with every gesture token and does not emit a token below 0.80. Those gesture definitions follow the discrete-gesture set described on Research. What a phone app can read from the Meta Neural Band today is a smaller event set; see Neural Band developer access.

Write a function in the session, or start from the docs. The full grammar is in the language specification.