Critiques we published
We asked hard questions about Cookwala and wrote the answers down. Each concern has an id in the action plan's concern register, along with our response and its status. Reviews from outside are welcome and will be listed here.
Is this going to work? (strategy) #
| Concern | Short answer | Status |
|---|---|---|
| The market doesn't exist yet; the spec is ahead of products | Small Core, demo first, no new spec without users | Core 0.2 done; device demo next |
| Nobody powerful has a reason to adopt | Lead with each adopter's gain; useful without robots | Food-bank pilot and device partner sought |
| The simulators prove what they assume | Fair baseline, ranges, "illustrative" labels; pilots replace them | Open |
| Hunger is about poverty and conflict, not surplus | Cookwala contributes; it doesn't claim to end hunger alone | Message changed |
| Safety, liability and attack surface | Limits enforced on the device; refusal; recalls; incident reports | Spec done; certifier review open |
| Privacy (health and religion data, ledgers vs erasure) | Local-first, selective disclosure, hash-only logs, consent | Spec done; impact assessment open |
| Too complex | Core 0.2; everything else marked experimental | Done |
| Founder dependency | Governance path to a neutral home | GOVERNANCE.md |
Is the technical design sound? #
| Concern | What changed in Core 0.2 |
|---|---|
| Operations had no physical meaning | Envelopes, heat levels, sensor ladders, altitude rule, test vectors |
| Unit and number bugs | °C only, absolute tolerances, kitchen units, densities, decimal money |
| Schemas accepted typos | Strict schemas with x- extensions; offline bundle |
| One mutable Mission document | Event log + projection, single sequencer, transitions table |
| The ledger proved little | Key records with revocation, witnessed checkpoints, rewrite detection |
| Undefined event delivery; safety on the bus | Sequence numbers, latency classes, heartbeats, "safety is local" |
| API surfaces drift | Core OpenAPI; every reference checked in CI |
| No verifier | Reference library and 106 conformance vectors |
Reviews we are asking for #
W3C TAG (identity, JSON-LD), IETF SCITT (event-log transparency), food scientists (envelopes), food-safety officers and dietitians (rule packs), a security audit, a data-protection review, and a certifier's gap analysis. See the external review program.