Operational ontology, with reflection · v0.1.8
ontoref: a lit path climbing to the ontoref octagon, ringed by four value nodes — Understand before you change · Verify every change · One knowledge for every actor · Tools, agents and CI aligned.

Sure-footed, and light on your feet.

Your project, your infra, your work, your life: still on the path you set?

A project, an infrastructure, a life: are you still going where you said you were going?

When your reason for being is verifiable and not just declared, holding your course stops costing effort.

What you put down, anyone can check.

What a project that knows itself can do

Three capabilities from one typed substrate — ask what breaks, verify who changed it, reach it from every actor. Independent of any runtime.

ASK BEFORE YOU TOUCH

Blast radius, before the diff

Ask what a change ripples into — which nodes, which invariants, which ADRs — before you write a line. The codebase you just inherited can tell you what is load-bearing.

WITNESS SEAM · Ed25519

A trail anyone can verify

Every change to authoritative state clears typed preconditions, then deposits an Ed25519 witness in a replayable, content-addressed oplog DAG. Any party verifies the history against actor keys — without trusting whoever produced it.

ONE GRAPH · CLI · MCP · CI

Same ontology, every actor

People, agents, and CI read one typed graph — from the terminal, from the IDE, from the pipeline. Knowledge that fails the build when it drifts, not at the next audit.

Architecture

Architecture Architecture

Protocol layers — entry point → declarative NCL → operational Nushell → optional Rust runtime. Each layer is independently testable.

Explore the live graph — 60 nodes, 171 edges →

Adopt in Any Project

Three commands. No lock-in.

1

ontoref setup

Scaffolds .ontology/ and reflection/ with typed NCL files. Idempotent — safe to re-run after upgrades.

2

ontoref describe project

Query your project's identity, axioms, tensions, and FSM state from the terminal. Actor-agnostic — same output for developer, agent, or CI.

3

ontoref run start

Start the daemon for HTTP UI and MCP. Configure via ~/.config/ontoref/config.ncl. The protocol works without it.

Structure Your Project's Knowledge

Install the CLI, run ontoref setup, and your project gains machine-queryable invariants, living ADRs, actor-aware operational modes, and optional daemon context sharing.

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