Concepts

The execution chain

Authority, invocation, actor, Consequence, effective policy, Decision, Attempt, Effect, and evidence — kept distinct from proposal through observation.

Invocation, actors and admission

How a trigger is admitted, how actors inside one invocation are attributed, how participants contribute facts, and why evidence is committed before an action runs.

The agent lifecycle

How Build and Run sit on a governance substrate that produces proof by construction — not a four-stage checklist.

AVAR receipts

Portable, hash-chained, Ed25519-signed evidence for governed actions. Verifies without Aarmos running.

The policy gate

How a governed tool call is evaluated, which outcomes the gate can return, and how each is recorded on a receipt.

Effective policy

Many sources — org, workspace, Consequence, actor, operator — resolve into one artifact with one digest. The merge only ever narrows.

Coverage and status

Is it governed right now? Four honest answers, why a live runtime is not a governed one, freshness windows, and retiring runtimes you no longer run.

Policy lifecycle

From observed traffic to a policy that governs: draft, simulate against real history, review, sign, activate — and why a draft can never activate itself.

Local-first storage

Vault, chats, connectors, and ledger are stored on the device, encrypted at rest (AES-GCM) when a device password is set. Keys are kept on the device, not by Aarmos-hosted services, and each is sent only to the provider or tool it belongs to when a call uses it — through a forwarder you run yourself, if you configure one. Without a device password the encryption key sits on the same device. Aarmos-hosted forwarding is currently unavailable.

Delegation

Durable, revocable grants rather than authority asserted at call time. Attenuation, chains, and what a decision relied upon.

Organizational governance

Scopes, membership, identity links, segregation of duties, and bounded break-glass — and why stale organizational state refuses authority without stopping evidence.

Governance continuity

Recovery Points name the governance state you can resume from — and contain none of it. Trust Recovery returns a state, never a score.

Authority succession & forks

When a team splits or an operator leaves: fork points, holds that replicate, and why a shared prefix is never shared history.

Information governance

Classification, declared purpose, and disclosure lineage — governing sensitive information without inspecting payloads.

Operational Intelligence

Readings derived from recorded evidence — contribution, stability, counterfactuals, overlapping execution — with coverage always disclosed.

Change Sets

Governing changes to governance itself: draft, simulate against real history, approve, activate, roll back — every step recorded as evidence.

Kill switch & bundle grace

How the panic stop behaves, what bundle grace means, and why signature failures never get a grace window.

Playbooks, signing & packs

Headless runs, Ed25519 signatures, signed packs, destructive-verb defaults, and attestation bundles.

The CLI bridge

Optional localhost pairing that lets the agent read files, watch git, and propose edits with approval.