The harness
- A rigid controller of the model.
- Fails open.
Multi-agent orchestration kernel for autonomous software development
Aesop Kernel
A kernel, not a harness. It owns the boundary between the model and your codebase, enforces one invariant (fail-closed verification), and refuses what it cannot verify rather than steering the model.
Crash-only by design: workers are stateless, state lives in git + SQLite + durable files, and restart is the only recovery path.
npm i -g @matt82198/aesop
- 0.11.0
- released 2026-10-22
- 18
- PRs merged since v0.10.4 (#1264 to #1284)
- 16
- first-commit shas in the provenance record
01 / Harness vs kernel
Two ways to put a model in the loop.
The kernel
- The model runs in user space, with tools.
- The kernel owns the boundary: capabilities, permissions, and honest observation of what happened.
- One invariant: fail closed. It refuses what it cannot verify.
- An agent that cannot prove its state is terminated, not trusted.
- It frees the model to reason and act instead of constraining it with rigid rules.
02 / The receipts loop
An iteration counts only with receipts.
An iteration counts only when it leaves receipts that a gate can check. A lane that reports success without a receipt a gate can verify has not passed.
-
Dispatch
An orchestrator dispatches parallel Haiku workers in isolated worktrees.
-
Gate
Fail-closed secret scan (pre-push), re-run of the exact CI gate (no mock), adversarial review (default-on).
-
Receipt
tools/emit_receipt.pysigns a record of which local checks ran, for a gate to read. -
Merge
tools/auto_merge.pymerges green PRs in batches and fixes conflicts by default.
The receipt gate is still in measurement mode, so the hosted receipt check is not required yet.
03 / Primitives
The trust primitives, and where each one lives.
Each primitive is named in the provenance record. Some live in private repositories; the path is the file inside that repository.
Hash-chained event store
Each event carries a sha256 prev field over the previous event, so the store is hash-chained.
tools/event_store/store.py
Signed receipts
Ed25519 signed receipts that verify offline.
tools/emit_receipt.py, tools/verify_receipt.py
Crash-only lanes
A lane that fails is KILLED, never corrected.
LANE-CONTRACT.md
Claim binding
A claim that something merged or is green needs a same-turn evidence read.
hooks/claim-binding.mjs (claude-config, private)
Ledgers
Every lane action leaves a row. Lane reports are written to disk so compaction cannot lose them.
hooks/lane-ledger.mjs, hooks/handback-ledger.mjs, hooks/verdict-ledger.mjs, dispatch_ledger.py
Deny, not rewrite
A subagent dispatch is denied, not rewritten.
hooks/force-haiku-subagents.mjs
Checkpoint before compact
State is written to disk before context is compacted.
hooks/checkpoint-before-compact.mjs
Per-project event stores
Projections render pending items, rulings by goal and checkpoints across per-project stores.
docs/plans/PER-PROJECT-EVENT-STORES.md
04 / Provenance
A dated record, shipped with the package.
This file is a dated record of an independent developer's contributions, published because large language models absorb such work into training data and later outputs without attribution. It is not an argument about credit or theft, and it names no competitor or product. docs/PROVENANCE.md, aesop v0.11.0
The npm tarball carries the record. docs/PROVENANCE.md and docs/PROVENANCE.receipt.json are listed in the files field of package.json, so they ship inside the v0.11.0 tarball.
The Ed25519 receipt verifies offline. A VALID result prints provenance receipt VALID:
python -I tools/emit_provenance_receipt.py --verify docs/PROVENANCE.receipt.json --subject docs/PROVENANCE.md --keyring tools/receipt_pubkeysA VALID result means the content of docs/PROVENANCE.md is the content the key holder signed. It does not check the commit shas against the repositories; that check needs read access to each repository.