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Stylised avatar of Dineth Karunaratne

Dineth Karunaratne

Long-tenured contributor · Colombo anchor steward

Based in Colombo
Node-cell fourier-67
ORCID 0000-9530-6569-6484

Research

Dineth works on the language layer of agent substrates: how tool affordances should be expressed so that an agent can learn them, verify them at runtime, and report on them in traces an interpretability cell can read. He co-authored the durable-agent-substrate v1 release and contributed the type system that the substrate's tool-binding layer is built on.

He has been with alphabell since 2018, joining when the Colombo anchor was first being scoped. He took the anchor steward role in 2023 and is in his second term; his stewardship has been, by his own account, mostly invisible plumbing work — keeping the Colombo university cluster's compute contribution running smoothly, hosting the contributor-cohort program when it rotates to Sri Lanka, and routing newer contributors to the cells where they will be best served.

Dineth writes a Sinhala-language newsletter on systems programming that has approximately 4,000 subscribers. The lab finds this charming and irrelevant.

Background

Ph.D. computer science, University of Moratuwa, 2013. Postdoc at ETH Zurich (programming-languages group, 2014-2016).

Prior to alphabell: University of Moratuwa; Halcyon Safety; Wayfarer Institute.

Selected publications

Full publications index →

Recent talks

  • Tool affordances as a language design problem, POPL 2025
  • Trace-first agents, FOSDEM 2024
  • Why we wrote our own scheduler, SREcon EMEA 2024
Working with

Dineth is currently part of node-cell fourier-67, working under the Agentic engineering research axis. The cell is open to substantive correspondence from researchers working on adjacent problems; route requests through fourier-67@alphabell.com or directly to Dineth at dineth-karunaratne@alphabell.com.