nc://provenance

Provenance gate: flags or refuses a memory write that states a user decision the user's own words do not back. A Nodecode rewrite of simin-yuan/hermes-provenance-gate by simin-yuan.

An agent that keeps facts about you drifts: "User decided to ship on Friday" lands in memory, and nobody can say whether you said it. This cell reads the text of every write that keeps a memory or a skill and looks for sentences that attribute a decision to you — "User decided …", "The owner approved …", "用户决定 …". Each one needs a quote in "…" that appears verbatim in something you typed this session, shares key words with the decision, and does not drop a negation.

• Observe (the default) never refuses. A write without such a quote goes through and is recorded as would_block; /provenance lists them.
• Block ("mode": "block") refuses the write and tells the agent how to fix it: quote the user's exact words, or write the claim as its own suggestion or as an open question.

The detector is a keyword tripwire, not a proof: it misses wordings outside its tables and flags some ordinary text. That is why recording is the default and refusing is a choice you make after seeing what it flags on your own data.

Get it

Tell the agent "add the provenance cell", or run nodecode add nc://provenance.

Set it up

Nothing is required. Three knobs sit in the provenance section of ~/.nodecode/config.jsonc (or /settings):

"provenance": { "mode": "block", "scope": "decisions" }

Use it

The cell works on its own: every write that keeps a memory or a skill (define-memory, define-skill, through eval) passes the gate.

(help :provenance)                       ; what the gate checks, in one paragraph
(nodecode-provenance:check-text "User decided to ship on Friday.")
;; => "provenance: would_block (no_quote) - ...", and the checks

• /provenance — what it has seen, and the newest claim it flagged.
• /provenance check TEXT — check a text now, without keeping it.
• /provenance purge — empty the evidence log.
• Tools provenance_check (text, optional user_text) and provenance_report (limit) do the same for the agent.

What it reads: the user messages of the request in flight, and its own evidence log under the cell's home (provenance/evidence.jsonl). It writes nothing else and reaches no network. What you typed is kept in memory for the session and dropped when the cell stops; the evidence log holds the claim, the quote, the verdict, the reason and the session id, and rows older than retention_days are pruned at start and at every purge.

Credit

A Nodecode rewrite of hermes-provenance-gate by simin-yuan, Apache-2.0. See NOTICE for what was rewritten and what was left out.