Gov
Ask what breaks before you touch it.
The harness has its canon: guides that steer before, sensors that correct after. And three open questions — how they stay coherent as it grows, how you evaluate their coverage, what a silent sensor means. A green check that does not declare what it looked at is a harness lying by omission.
— Birgitta Böckeler — Harness engineering for coding agents · See what breaks
Ask the graph what breaks before you touch it. describe impact <node> returns the blast radius of a change — which nodes, which invariants, which ADRs — before you write a line. The system you just inherited can tell you what is load-bearing, and your AI agent can mount that same context instead of guessing.
Whoever has to decide about a system they did not build cannot tell what is load-bearing from what is incidental. README and docs are incomplete or stale; the originating decisions live in the heads of people who left. So the safe move is to touch as little as possible, approve as little as possible — and feedback, fixes and improvements stall, because the cost of an unknown blast radius falls on whoever moves first. It falls the same way on the engineer making the change, on the lead who has to sign it off, and on whoever is asked whether it is safe to ship this week: three different jobs, one missing answer.
The same gap is what makes AI agents dangerous on an unfamiliar system: their context window cannot hold the whole of it, so they act on a reconstructed, often hallucinated model — changing things that violate invariants nobody wrote down. Human and agent are flying without the same map of consequence.
ontoref Gov
Boundaries and members: what a project declares and which artefacts a consumer inherits.
Whether a subject admits government at all: what can be declared, checked and held.
What work is committed and how an act is delivered, accepted and published.
What it is
Gov is ontoref's own domain. It holds the arrangement — what a project's boundary declares, its members, which artefacts a consumer inherits — and the exercise — what work is committed and how an act is delivered. Its name is the root of governance, governability and government, and elects none of them.
Why
A decision, a boundary or a delivery that lives only in someone's memory binds no one. In Gov each one is a declaration a project can be held to, and what holds it is a mechanism, not a good intention.
What for
A project reaches Gov by bond, never by imposition, and takes only the parts it needs. In signature governance each project carries one: the contract, the operations of work, the signature, the dossier, the agreement and the signing on an agent's behalf. Beside them, the capabilities any state of governance uses: the host boundary, deployment, the observed session and the opening by name.
How governance is layered
ontoref's base: bonds and planes, content bound by digest, the unsigned work order, the check form, and mandatum's types. Every project is written in it; a project can bond without adopting any governance.
The gov domain, in ontoref: how the constellation is organised, its management modes, and decisions held by validators.
The foedus domain, provided by the foedus project and operated by warden: the agreement, each party's annex and the tests that prove it. A project is here because it is a party to the agreement.
Isolation, provisioning, wuwei and openbyname are capabilities any state of governance uses — the agent's boundary, deployment, sessions, and running tasks locally — not governance: governance needs them, they do not need governance.
Each project chooses its governance mode
Coherence only: ontoref checks that the declarations hold together. No signature.
The person signs. It detects a departure; it does not prevent it.
Signature and isolation together. It prevents.
The mode is the project's own declaration. Where a project has not declared one, its card says so.
Architecture
How the members hold together
Hover or tap a project, or pick a card below, to see only its relations; a picked card keeps its route on the map until it is picked again. wuwei watches the work: sessions publish onto its bus and its session view shows the principal what runs and what waits.
The constellation
One part each
Workflow
A Statement of Work, from terms to trunk
The SOW holds the terms, owned by a person outside the agent's reach; a run is the execution, owned by the agent. A dossier can bring several SOWs to agreement together, and each then goes on to its own delivery. Two rules make the whole gate: no scope and contract, no start; no witness, no done.
foedus
An act under signature governance
foedus v1 is a draft: it is not in force until the owner signs its digest and signatio attests it; until then every item reads as a proposal.
Joining
Reached by bond, never imposed
Bond
A project declares its relation to a domain in .domains-ontoref/<domain>/bonds.ncl: the axis, its state, and on a dependency the kind of relation it keeps.
Declare
On custody it says which axes it provides and which it claims. A claim on a bonded project must resolve to that project's provision.
Witness
An axis counts as enforced only when a command observes it holding. Until then it stays declared, and the page says so.
Relations read from each project's bonds, custody declaration and authority client when this page was generated.
The prize, once inside
When your reason for being is verifiable and not just declared, holding your course stops costing effort.
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