The canonical doctrine for the Gilamonster Foundation agent line — owned by no single product, cited by all of them (newt-agent, agent-bridle, agent-mesh, gilamonster-agent, gilamonster-capabilities, hermes-thoon, wyvern-agent).
It answers one question: how do you build powerful agents without building the Demiurge? — power without wisdom, certain of itself, self-destructively ignorant.
You cannot construct wisdom. You can construct the conditions under which it stays possible, refusable, and its absence survivable. That is the Charter.
The Steward's Charter: Writ · Scar · Refusal · Novice · Tether · Provenance
Beyond the Charter: Reach
| Primitive | Protects | One line |
|---|---|---|
writ |
power | authority is borrowed, scoped, revocable, signed |
scar |
memory→wisdom | errors and their corrections are kept, not just wins |
refusal |
dissent | no component may eliminate the possibility of dissent |
novice |
humility | fresh eyes have standing to challenge accumulated dogma |
tether |
guidance | the human channel that loosens with trust, never severs |
provenance |
origin | nothing may claim to author what it inherited |
reach |
(boundary) | the unencodable gap where human intent enters |
The full doctrine — systems spec, the six audit questions, the gnostic gloss, and
where each primitive already lives in the tree — is in
STEWARDS_CHARTER.md.
It has to earn its keep. The Charter is only worth anything if removing it
measurably degrades real outcomes. The falsification protocol — designed so the
Charter can lose — is in docs/VALIDATION.md.
The Charter is doctrine and the canonical implementations of the invariants
that don't already live elsewhere (writ lives in agent-mesh/agent-bridle,
provenance in kyln). The homeless primitives get reference crates here.
| Crate | Invariant | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
charter-scar |
scar |
append-only, hash-chained record of metabolized failure (error + correction) — the memory |
charter-refusal |
refusal |
every decision declinable; a refusal records into the scar (the keystone, depends on charter-scar) |
charter-novice |
novice |
a consequential action can't proceed without a recorded fresh-eyes pass; a challenge is a refusal of dogma |
use charter_scar::{Scar, ScarKind, ScarLog};
let mut log = ScarLog::new();
let w = log.record(Scar::new(ScarKind::Mistake, "deploy on a Friday",
"no rollback path", "two-hour outage"));
log.heal(&w, "always land a rollback path first").unwrap(); // metabolized
assert!(log.verify_chain());A repo adopts the Charter by pointing at it and naming which invariants it realizes. Example, in a crate or service README:
Governed by the Steward's Charter. Realizes:
writ(Caveats/Gate),refusal(dispatch dual),scar(audit log).
Code and specs use the plain systems names (writ, scar, refusal, …). The
gnostic/philosophical prose — the Demiurge, Thomas' seven-day-old, the scar that
makes a machine feel human — stays in the Charter's commentary, where it grounds
the why without leaking into the namespace.
v0 — vocabulary frozen, doctrine drafted. Private for now (Foundation discipline); a candidate to make public when deliberately ready. Offered under MIT OR Apache-2.0 so the line — and others — may adopt it freely.