WHAT THIS IS
state = fold(events)
Cooldis is a Rust kernel for declared agent workloads, built in the microkernel tradition: closer to seL4 than to Semantic Kernel. The kernel does not think, does not prompt, and does not orchestrate. It owns mechanism and refuses policy: capability grants, tool visibility, provider access, dispatch, cancellation, resume, audit receipts.
At every step the runtime folds the event stream, refreshes policy, computes the admissible continuations, executes, and records. A workflow is a strict continuation policy; an agent is an adaptive one. They are settings on the same machine, not rival product categories.
You declare the agent before anything runs: model profile, tools, resources, secrets, permissions, context policy. The kernel turns the declaration into governed work.
THREE LAWS, COMPILED
The core stays small because the membership test is mechanical: if changing a thing could make the system's audit receipts lie, it is compiled into the kernel. Below that bar, everything is 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 in the system is the stream: an append-only, totally ordered sequence of events. Streams are never mutated. Order is authoritative, and it 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 calls are chaotic by definition, so their output enters as events with provenance, never as views. Receipts record what the runtime actually did; they are never recomputed.
Recovery is journal-skip, not replay-reconstruction: orchestration re-runs from the top and completed admissions are fed from the log. Retry is a policy decision, not a runtime property. 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, and an expiry — leased, never owned. The vocabulary of change is denial-driven: a petition asks to widen the universe, a condensation proposes settling 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 (the compiler, the test suite, the kernel's own receipts) faces a written canon, and every anomaly between them is triaged into exactly 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: a lint, a test, a schema check. 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: a CLI, a daemon, an RPC app-server, an MCP server, an ACP agent. A grant-scoped virtual filesystem. Bash builtins as faithful surfaces over operations. A Wasm runtime for custom 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.