Agents at work 17: When Logic Meets AI w/ Rodrigo Stevaux

In this episode of Agents at Work, Jordi Montes sits down with Rodrigo Stevaux to explore how logic, formal methods, and AI are converging. Rodrigo is an economist turned technologist, researcher, and builder.

They discuss:

• How Rodrigo went from venture capital to deep tech and formal verification

• What “formal methods” really are and why proving correctness matters more than testing

• How logic programming (like Prolog) can make AI agents safer, smarter, and more deterministic

• The revival of symbolic reasoning and its link to modern “neuro-symbolic” AI

• Why knowledge bases and graph databases are secretly the same thing

• The missing link between today’s prompt-based agents and tomorrow’s reliable systems

Rodrigo shares his experience bringing old-school rigor to modern AI, from using state machines in agent design to mixing Prolog with LLMs for true reasoning. 

Together, they unpack why specification is the new code, and how the next breakthroughs in AI might come not from more data, but from better logic.

If you’ve ever wondered how we can make AI agents reason, not just predict this conversation is a must-listen.