Formatica — an open wire format for AI agents. 60-80% fewer tokens than JSON. Human-debuggable. Stream-friendly.
Inspired by 40 years of battle-tested EDI density. Built for LLM agents.
Token Efficient
Compact, positional segments reduce JSON key overhead and repetitive syntax.
Human Readable
Dense enough for machines, plain enough for humans to inspect and debug by eye.
Stream Native
Append-only segments fit real-time agent exchange better than fully nested object trees.
Schema Driven
Message meaning comes from explicit segment definitions, versions, and profiles.
The JSON tax is real.
JSON is excellent for web apps, but it is a costly transport for agent-to-agent communication. Repeating field names, braces, and deeply nested structures burn tokens without adding much semantic value. Formatica takes a different path: positional, segment-based messages optimized for compactness, streaming, and predictable parsing — while staying readable enough to debug in a terminal.
{
"messageType": "task.update",
"agentId": "planner-7",
"taskId": "abc123",
"status": "running",
"progress": 42,
"summary": "Fetched upstream schema"
}
MSG*task.update AGT*planner-7 TSK*abc123*running*42 TXT*Fetched upstream schema
Illustrative token counts only; exact savings vary by tokenizer and message shape. The point is the shape: fewer repeated labels, less punctuation overhead, cleaner streaming.
Free, open, and community-driven.
Formatica is being developed in public as an open standard for agent interoperability. The specification text is intended to remain freely usable, remixable, and implementable. Current repository licensing indicates the spec and schemas are under CC0-1.0.