We show how dinaturality plays a central role in the interpretation of directed type theory where types are given by (1-)categories and directed equality by hom-functors. We introduce a first-order directed type theory where types are semantically interpreted as categories, terms as functors, predicates as dipresheaves, and proof-relevant entailments as dinatural transformation. This type theory is equipped with an elimination principle for directed equality, motivated by dinaturality, which closely resembles the J -rule used in Martin-Löf type theory. This directed J -rule comes with a simple syntactic restriction which recovers all theorems about symmetric equality, except for symmetry. Dinaturality is used to prove properties about transitivity (composition), congruence (functoriality), and transport (coYoneda) in exactly the same way as in Martin-Löf type theory, and allows us to obtain an internal “naturality for free”. We then argue that the quantifiers of directed type theory should be ends and coends, which dinaturality allows us to capture formally. Our type theory provides a formal treatment to (co)end calculus and Yoneda reductions, which we use to give distinctly logical proofs to the (co)Yoneda lemma, the adjointness property of Kan extensions via (co)ends, exponential objects of presheaves, and the Fubini rule for quantifier exchange. Our main theorems are formalized in Agda.

We present a slick proof of completeness and cocompleteness for categories of F-automata, where the span of maps E ←d E⊗ I s→ O that usually defines a deterministic automaton of input I and output O in a monoidal category (K,⊗) is replaced by a span E ← FE → O for a generic endofunctor F : K → K of a generic category K: these automata exist in their "Mealy" and "Moore" version and form categories F-Mly and F-Mre; such categories can be presented as strict 2-pullbacks in Cat and whenever F is a left adjoint, both F-Mly and F-Mre admit all limits and colimits that K admits. We mechanize our main results using the proof assistant Agda and the library https://github.com/agda/agda-categories.