Kinetic Enforcement Gates

The Kinetic Enforcement Gates: Closed-Loop Defense-in-Depth

In SDCS v1.8.0, repository constraints are not suggestions—they are physical laws of motion enforced across spatial, cognitive, and epistemic defense tiers:

Defense Tier	Gate	Name	Trigger / Command	Physical Failure Prevented
Spatial & Structural	Gate C	Constitutional Immutability	.githooks/pre-commit	Unauthorized tampering or loosening of spine.md or wiring.yaml.
Spatial & Structural	Gate T	Topological Invariant Gate	sdcs verify --topology	Prohibited AST cross-subsystem imports violating wiring.yaml.
Spatial & Structural	Gate P	Blast-Radius Sandbox Guard	sdcs verify --sandbox	Staging modifications within declared protected_paths.
Spatial & Structural	Gate M	Cartography Drift Gate	sdcs map --check	Commits with untracked new files or orphaned paths in app_map.md.
Cognitive & Temporal	Gate S	Working Memory Budget Gate	sdcs verify --state	Context window amnesia caused by bloated state.md (>350 tokens) & subagent lifecycle.
Cognitive & Cache	Gate C-Cache	KV-Cache Prefix Invariance	sdcs verify --cache-invariance	Cache-busting volatile tokens (timestamps, turn counters) in system prompt prefix.
Cognitive & Fleet	Gate W	Secret & PII Sanitizer	sdcs warehouse publish	Publishing sensitive API keys, tokens, emails, phone numbers, or IPs to central warehouse.
Epistemic & Quality	Gate Q	Test Quality & Anti-Mock Gate	sdcs verify --quality	"Hollow tests" asserting True, assertless test functions, or swallowed exceptions.
Epistemic & Toolchain	Gate E	Toolchain & Environment Gate	sdcs doctor / --env	Blaming valid application code for local runtime, interpreter, or toolchain drift.
Kinetic Circuit	Breaker	The Circuit Breaker	sdcs verify --cycles	Alternating period-2 file thrashing ($A \to B \to A \to B$) and infinite token loops.

---

1. Gate C: Constitutional Immutability

• Mechanism: Git pre-commit hook checks git diff --cached --name-only for spine.md and wiring.yaml.
• Enforcement: Aborts commit unless overridden by explicit human environment variable:

  export SDCS_ALLOW_CONSTITUTIONAL_MUTATION=1

2. Gate T: Topological Invariant Gate

• Mechanism: Evaluates Python Abstract Syntax Trees (AST) using Python's native ast module (plus polyglot JS/TS support). Does not execute untrusted code or trigger module initializers.
• Contract: Validates every import against allowed_dependencies declared in wiring.yaml.
• Zero-Argumentation Loop: When an import fails Gate T:

  # Automatically formats boundary violation into Inverted ADR (## REJ-XXX)
  # and appends it to decisions.md
  sdcs verify --topology --append-rejections

  The rejection remains unstaged on disk, forcing the agent to reflect on negative memory and refactor.

3. Gate P: Blast-Radius Sandbox Guard

• Mechanism: Verifies staged git modifications against declarative protected_paths in wiring.yaml.
• Enforcement: Halts commits attempting to mutate infrastructure, deployment configurations, or protected schemas without explicit authorization (sdcs verify --sandbox).

4. Gate M: Cartography Drift Gate

• Mechanism: Statically compares tracked Git repository files against entries in app_map.md.
• Enforcement: Integrated into .githooks/pre-commit. Halts git commit if new files exist without cartography entries.
• Remediation:

  # Check for drift
  sdcs map --check
  
  # Reconcile app_map.md with disk in-stride, preserving developer annotations
  sdcs map --sync

5. Gate S: Working Memory Budget Gate

• Mechanism: Deterministic token-budget linter verifying token counts and canonical 3-section schema of state.md.
• Enforcement: Requires state.md $\le 350$ tokens (or custom ceiling via --max-tokens) and enforces canonical headers: ## Current Objective, ## Status & Gate Verification, ## Immediate Next Action. Also handles ephemeral subagent blackboard lifecycle (sdcs state fork and sdcs state rollup).

6. Gate W: Secret & PII Sanitizer

• Mechanism: Static AST and regex scanner inspecting code and documentation before publication to the central cognitive warehouse.
• Enforcement: Automatically redacts Google, OpenAI, GitHub, and AWS API keys, bearer tokens, email addresses, phone numbers, and routable IPv4 addresses (sdcs verify --warehouse and sdcs warehouse publish).

7. Gate Q: Test Quality & Anti-Mock AST Auditor

• Mechanism: Static AST inspector auditing newly created or modified test suites.
• Enforcement: Halts commits introducing:
  • Rule Q1 (Trivial Assertions): Tests asserting True, not False, or x is not None.
  • Rule Q2 (Assertless Tests): Test functions executing code without assertions.
  • Rule Q3 (Swallowed Exceptions): Masking test failures via try...except Exception: pass.
  • Rule Q4 (Mock Abuse): Mocks exceeding assertions without invoking the target unit.

8. Gate E: Toolchain & Environment Invariant Lock

• Mechanism: Verifies local Python runtime interpreter, system tools (git, pytest), and required environment variables declared in wiring.yaml or pyproject.toml.
• Enforcement: Blocks commits if the environment is misconfigured (sdcs verify --env), and provides comprehensive diagnostic reporting via sdcs doctor.

9. The Circuit Breaker (File Oscillation & Thrashing Prevention)

• Mechanism: Static transition graph analyzer tracking modified file sets across consecutive commits and turns.
• Enforcement: Detects period-2 alternating thrashing loops ($A \to B \to A \to B$) and isolated single-file thrashing. Trips immediately to prevent agents from burning tokens and introducing Frankenstein patches (sdcs verify --cycles).

10. Gate C-Cache: KV-Cache Prefix Invariance Guard

• Mechanism: Static token and regex analyzer auditing system prompts, boot instructions, and hydration templates.
• Enforcement: Rejects cache-busting volatile tokens (ISO timestamps, turn counters like Turn 4 of 20, process IDs) from being positioned in the static prompt prefix. Guarantees 100% KV-cache hit rate across multi-turn trajectories (sdcs verify --cache-invariance).

11. Deterministic Pre-Flight Auto-Repair

• Mechanism: Sandbox execution hook intercepting code changes before kinetic gates and test suites run.
• Enforcement: Runs local determinist formatters (ruff --fix, black, prettier, gofmt) using 0 LLM inference tokens, eliminating unnecessary LLM turns caused by trivial style and formatting failures (sdcs repair).