Governance Engine

Governance Engine

The constitution is enforced, not advisory.

A rule that a system is encouraged to follow is a rule it will abandon under pressure. These are checks that reject output.

What gets rejected

Violation	Why
A forecast without an invalidation condition	an unfalsifiable prediction cannot be graded, so it can never be wrong — and never teaches anything
A claim without evidence	assertion is not knowledge
An omitted minority opinion	erasing dissent destroys the record needed to learn that the minority was right

Rejection means the council reworks the verdict. It is not a warning appended to the output.

Minority tracking

When the council converges, the dissent is recorded with the verdict. Later, when Outcome Tracking grades the prediction, the House can discover that the minority was correct. Reputation adjusts, and the pattern becomes visible: this member is systematically overruled and systematically right.

That is only discoverable because the dissent was kept.

The GPS-2 permission gate

Separate from constitutional checks, and armed at startup:

[Governance] GPS-2 gate armed — deny-by-default · human gate on irreversible tools

Rule	Meaning
Deny-by-default	anything not explicitly allowed is denied
Pre-execution	the gate runs before the tool call, never after the damage
Irreversible ⇒ human	an irreversible action needs an explicit grant and a human gate
Every decision logged	allow, deny, and escalate all reach the audit log
No self-widening	an agent cannot grant itself permissions

The last one is the cardinal rule. If an agent could edit its own grants, every other permission check would be decorative.

The policy stack

Seven policies at three hooks. Four of them run before any action with an outside effect; the other three guard what the House is willing to believe rather than what it is willing to do:

PRE_ACT       governance.gps2 · shadow.fabrication · approvals.prior_deny · run.tool_allow
PRE_VALIDATE  cvl.quality_gate
PRE_COMMIT    guidance.g1 · warrant.cee_c1

Most-restrictive-wins, fail-closed (an error denies), and every evaluation is audited. shadow.fabrication specifically refuses an action whose intent is to invent evidence.

The boot log prints each hook separately, and kernel_policy.registered_by_hook() is the authority — a flat list of all seven under one hook's name would misreport where the House actually stops things.

curl http://127.0.0.1:8766/api/governance/config

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