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
Know, act, verify — from one typed substrate that people, agents and CI read alike, from the terminal, the IDE or the pipeline. Independent of any runtime.
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.
Procedures that run on what it knows
A mode is a typed DAG — actors, steps, dependencies, guards — not a runbook in prose. It reads the project's declarations and acts on them: the release mode sizes the version bump from the declared dependency edges, then verifies what a stranger actually receives.
A claim holds only while a check holds it
Every check that can block declares how it fails — a planted break it must turn red — or why nothing can make it fail. A signature is a separate choice: a project that adopts signature governance signs inside a core its owner signed (foedus · mandatum · warden), not in the protocol.
Architecture
Protocol layers — entry point → declarative NCL → operational Nushell → optional Rust runtime. Each layer is independently testable.
Adopt in Any Project
Three commands. No lock-in.
ontoref setup
Scaffolds .ontology/ and reflection/ with typed NCL files. Idempotent — safe to re-run after upgrades.
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.
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.