A libre governance layer for AI-assisted work: every agent walk is bounded by a contract, checked by deterministic gates, and recorded in a durable, tamper-evident ledger.
Hand anyone a non-trivial assignment — homework, a lab experiment, a consulting engagement — and the expectation is universal: do the work, and keep a legible record of it. Show your steps. Keep the lab notebook. File the report. No serious discipline, from grade school to professional practice, accepts "trust me, it's done" as a deliverable.
Should we expect less from our AI helpers?
We can't introspect a model directly, so librecode enforces the same discipline externally that we'd expect from any capable colleague:
- A contract states the work requirements — machine-checkable, filled as the work progresses, never graded by the one who did the work.
- Deterministic gates check every deposit of work against its contract. An agent supplies work; it never supplies the terms of its own checking.
- A durable ledger keeps the pertinent record, zettelkasten-style — findings, decisions, and their why — append-only and replayable, so progress is tamper-evident and any reviewer can reconstruct what happened from the record alone.
Prompt variation can't fix what a model systematically cannot see: errors stay correlated through the model itself. Only genuinely different models break that floor — which is why librecode is heterogeneous-first, composing disparate models (and deterministic checks, and the human) rather than deepening a bond with any single vendor. No incumbent can build this: composing competitors is structurally against their interests. Freedom here isn't ideology bolted on — it is the enabling condition of the math. See MANIFESTO.md and docs/foundations.md for the full argument.
| Piece | Where | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Reference model | src/model/ |
The pure state machine of governed work — DAG, node phases, deposits, event log — with four crown-jewel invariants as executable predicates. |
| Metaharness | src/meta/ |
Campaign orchestration: DAG scheduling, crash-safe journal, native Nickel gates, multi-child supervision with condition/restart recovery. |
| Runner | src/runner/ |
The reference supervisable walker — an event-sourced LLM agent harness proving out the supervision contract (freeze/handshake, cooperative shutdown, resume). |
A campaign flows: a human-authored boundary contract goes in → the DAG dispatches walkers → walkers land deposits → gates check them → the ledger records everything → the human is surfaced exactly where judgment is needed → a merged, auditable branch comes out.
Pre-1.0 and molten. The proof-of-concept is reached: a real supervised subprocess walker with working tools, a native gate producing a gated artifact, mid-run kill/resume, and a runnable end-to-end demo against a local model. The current push is a usable MVP — librecode governing real day-to-day campaigns, including its own development.
Inside the Nix shell (shell.nix provides SBCL and dependencies):
just build # compile all systems
just test # FiveAM + check-it suite
just repl # interactive REPL with everything loaded
just demo # end-to-end campaign demo against local Ollama
- MANIFESTO.md — why libre, why now
- docs/foundations.md — first principles: the decorrelation theorem, the null hypothesis, what "stable" means
- docs/design.md — the campaign lifecycle, council protocol, human seam
- docs/model.md — the reference state machine and its invariants
- docs/roadmap.md — workstreams and sequencing
Not yet declared (pre-release).