WHAT THIS IS
state = fold(events)
Cooldis is a Rust kernel for declared agent workloads, in the microkernel tradition: closer to seL4 than to Semantic Kernel. It does not think, prompt, or orchestrate. It owns mechanism and refuses policy: grants, tool visibility, provider access, dispatch, cancellation, resume, receipts.
Each step folds the event stream, refreshes policy, computes the admissible continuations, executes, records. A workflow is a strict continuation policy; an agent is an adaptive one. Settings on the same machine, not rival product categories.
You declare the agent before anything runs: model, tools, secrets, permissions, context policy. The kernel turns the declaration into governed work.
THREE LAWS, COMPILED
The membership test is mechanical: if changing a thing could make the receipts lie, it is compiled into the kernel. Below that bar, configuration. Above it, law.
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1
Every surface is faithful, or it is illegal.
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2
Every discharge carries provenance; chaotic output discharges as events, never as views.
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3
Assembly is deterministic, budgeted, and receipted; it selects and arranges, never creates.
An effect without a receipt did not lawfully happen.
HOW TRUTH WORKS HERE
The only durable truth is the stream: append-only, totally ordered, never mutated. Order comes from sequence, not time; wall-clock is witnessed on every event and trusted for nothing.
Every event declares its origin: witnessed, the world did it, or discharged, a coupled function did it. Model output is chaotic by definition, so it enters as events with provenance, never as views. Receipts record what the runtime actually did, and are never recomputed.
Recovery is journal-skip: orchestration re-runs from the top and completed admissions are fed from the log. Even policy reload is a witnessed event; replay folds the policy that was recorded, never the one currently loaded.
AUTHORITY IS LEASED
Published is not visible; visible is not granted; granted is not unobserved.
A mandate is a standing grant with a grantor, a scope, a budget, an expiry. Leased, never owned. The vocabulary of change is denial-driven: a petition widens the universe, a condensation settles recurring work into an operation, a demotion narrows what failed.
And the final authority, the anchor, is a human, and is never modeled.
THE DESIGN IS GOVERNED
The design itself runs under law. A deterministic oracle (compiler, tests, the kernel's own receipts) faces a written canon; every anomaly between them is triaged into one of three cases: absorb it, escalate it, or fix the code. Changing a law requires the human anchor, and a settled change must leave a mechanical guard behind. Elegance does not downgrade case 2 to case 1.
Seven amendments so far. The record of them is append-only, like everything else here.
RECEIPTS
One kernel, many faithful surfaces: CLI, daemon, RPC app-server, MCP server, ACP agent, a grant-scoped virtual filesystem, bash builtins over operations, a Wasm runtime for declared folds. Operations and manifests are content-addressed: aliases resolve to immutable hashes, and the resolution emits a receipt.
WHERE IT STANDS
Experimental, and says so on the box. V1 is deliberately local: packageable agents with durable execution on your machine, no cloud between you and your own event stream. Cloud placement, registries, marketplaces: designed, named in the lexicon, and not claimed until they exist.
The console ships inside the kernel release: cooldis console.