cerebral work // os · soma

An operating system for governed autonomy.

soma is the agentic OS: run an enterprise on a persistent agent workforce where every consequential verb is classified through an enforced gate ladder, audited, and — the wedge — autonomy is earned per-verb through track record and named human ratification, never granted by default. Cerebral runs on it as instance #0; the reflex wire format is an open governance spec.

What it does

The body of an enterprise run by agents. Each function agent has a canon, its own memory lens, a verb × tier gate scope, and — critically — no credentials of its own. Every side-effecting call routes through the reflex plane, which classifies, gates, executes, and writes the audit record. Governance you can bypass is advisory; soma's is structural. There is no ungoverned mode — not even for dev.

• reflex — the gate plane. The runtime reflex arc. Verb classifier over a four-tier ladder — GREEN (autonomous, audited), YELLOW (notify-and-proceed, vetoable), RED (blocks on named-human sign-off), NEVER (sealed, no path exists). It is also the credential custodian and the executor: the agent submits the action, reflex classifies and runs it, the agent never sees the key. The one genuinely new hard thing.
• trust-ledger — the audit spine. Append-only, per-agent per-verb: every execution outcome, promotion, demotion, and ratification. N clean executions of a verb make an agent promotion-eligible; only a human ratifies the promotion. Any incident demotes the verb to RED instantly and freezes pending promotions. NEVER-tier to touch except through reflex — agents cannot write to their own autonomy state.
• hermes — the function-agent runtime. Per-user, per-function durable agents on a multi-tenant NATS bus, estate-native on Kubernetes: a nats-tenant-operator issuing account-per-user CRDs, a nats-bridge sidecar, and read-only agent charts. Resolves the runtime open-question toward estate-native K8s; carries the per-user-hermes design forward from unsigned-paas.
• deck — the operator surface. SvelteKit PWA on Cloudflare Workers. The gate queue (sign-off cards with payload + diff), function-agent status board, audit timeline, trust-ledger view, promotion ratification. Reaches the founder on any device — a RED card cannot wait for a terminal. Board-tier-gated via @cerebral/gate.
• cli — the terminal line. Rust, with a ratatui TUI and a machine --json mode: gate queue, agent status, sign-off, ledger. The same cards the deck renders, in the operator's native habitat — the lizard/meshctl precedent carried onto the gate plane.
• spec — the reflex wire format. The open governance spec: three record types — action submission → classification, sign-off request/response, and the sealed audit record that feeds the trust-ledger delta. Any agent runtime can submit; any enterprise can mount its own policy + sign-off surface. RFC drafting is Phase 8, spec-from-practice after instance #0 has proven the shape.

Architecture

soma composes the estate rather than greenfielding: reverie/engram is the memory substrate, godseat's gate taxonomy, terrarium's lifecycle gates, Keycloak + @cerebral/gate for the human identity plane. What changes at the OS layer is the reflex plane, the trust-ledger, the function-agent runtime, and the two operator surfaces.

Status

SCAFFOLD as of 2026-07-18 — a federated terrarium node that adopts the standards and stays its own repo. The soma design seed (projects/soma/ in terrarium) has been ejected and re-homed; the ground-truth design lives in docs/soma/ARCHITECTURE.md, this repo is its build home. Phase 1 — the reflex daemon v0: verb taxonomy + classify + audit + credential custody for one tool surface — has not yet landed. Until it does, verbs do not actually route through reflex; the components are specified, not executing.

The build sequence runs Phase 0 → Phase 8: seed hardening, reflex daemon v0, the soma/comms pilot (draft-only), memory tiers, the promotion mechanic, staffing the company, surfaces to parity, cortex on soma, and finally the reflex RFC. The runtime component lands alongside Phase 1–2. The milestone that closes Phase 1 is narrow and load-bearing: an agent asks to send an email, the founder approves from a phone, and the agent never saw the credential.

Naming: soma is a working title — unregistrable as a public brand, pending Marc/Laura ratification. os is the repo and build name; the product name is a separate, deferred decision. Nothing here bakes a public brand.