nc://steward

Project Stewardship: one project, its autonomy level, the health its own checks measured, and the initiatives a person approves. A Nodecode rewrite of Sahil-SS9/hermes-project-stewardship by Sahil-SS9.

Get it

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

Use it

Ask the agent to open a project, or run /steward for the board.

• steward_open registers a project: its directory, its autonomy level, the checks that measure it, and the executables those checks may use. Opening it again changes what you name.
• steward_status answers one project (settings, last measurement, initiatives) or the whole board.
• steward_cycle runs the project's checks in its own directory and records what they measured: healthy when every check passed, watch when one failed, degraded when two failed or a high-severity one did, unknown when a check could not run.
• steward_propose files one initiative — title, rationale, expected outcome, risk — and leaves it for a person.
• steward_bind makes the session read its project's line at each request; /steward bind PROJECT does the same from the shell, and /steward bind stops it.

A person decides: /steward approve PROJECT INITIATIVE or /steward reject PROJECT INITIATIVE. The model proposes; it cannot approve its own work.

Autonomy

The six levels are the original's, weakest first. Each adds to the one below, and nothing is ever taken away by a higher level:

Two gates follow from it: a cycle needs builder or above, because running a check is running a command; a proposal needs planner or above, and a measured health that is neither unknown nor critical.

What a check may run

A check is written as name: command (!name: command makes its failure high severity). The command is split on whitespace into an argv — there is no shell, so no quoting, no pipes, no redirection. Its first word must be named in the project's allow list, and the list is fail-closed: with no allowlist, nothing runs. Each check runs in the project's own directory, with a deadline (timeout_seconds, a minute by default) and no stdin, and only the head of its output is kept as evidence (evidence_chars).

Health is what those checks measured. It is never a model's opinion, and never a percentage.

Set it up

Nothing is required. The section has no key and no server:

"steward": {
  "data_file": "steward/projects.json",   // under the Nodecode home
  "timeout_seconds": 60,                  // one check's ceiling
  "evidence_chars": 400                   // how much of a check's output is kept
}

The registry is one JSON file: the projects, and which session follows which project. Delete it and the cell starts empty again.

What is in it

License

Apache License 2.0, the original's. See LICENSE and NOTICE.