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 — bound into a signed chain that cites the exact policy version it was judged under. Authority is delegated per verb by a named human and revocable by signed amendment, 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.
• marrow — the constitution and the audit spine. Append-only, hash-chained, Ed25519-signed. One stream carries two kinds of entry: every decision the gate made, and every amendment to the policy it decided under — so was this decided under the law as it then stood? is answered by folding the chain to a sequence number, not by trusting a separate config history. Authority is enumerated per (agent, verb) and default-deny; altering it is a signed amendment by a named human. NEVER-tier to touch except through reflex — and reflex holds no signing key, so it reads the ledger and structurally cannot write it.
• 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, marrow view, amendment sign-off. 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 enters the marrow chain. 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, marrow, 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, gate calibration, 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.