docs(loop): the charter the autonomous loops steer by - #189
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The constitution already protects CHARTER.md; the file did not exist, so the Scout had no direction to read and the Ledger had no scope boundary to check a proposed gap against. Everything derivable from the repo is written down: the mission from the README's positioning, nine invariants from CONTRIBUTING, design.md and the CI jobs that already enforce them, and an out-of-scope list assembled from decisions the repo has already made (single Rust binary, no DataMaker dependency, six adapters, no selector-engine growth to match another framework's idioms). Nine points are marked DECIDE rather than guessed. They need product judgement - the commercial boundary, whether Tier 3 web migration is worth its noise, the milestone itself, the token budget, the identity mechanism. Until each is resolved the loops treat that area as out of scope, which is the safe default. Invariant 2 (replay never requires an API key) was verified while drafting rather than asserted: it holds. Doing so surfaced #188 - an agent that fails to start reports "0 model calls" and discards its stderr, blaming the replay for the adopter's missing dependency. #187 and #188 are the same defect class on the same boundary, so both join the milestone's exit criteria. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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The constitution merged in #186 already protects
CHARTER.md— but the file didn't exist. The Scout had no direction to read, and the Ledger had no scope boundary to check a proposed gap against.What's derived, not invented
Everything traceable to the repo is written down with its source:
CONTRIBUTING.md,docs/design.md, and the CI jobs that already enforce them (versions agree, the secret-scan corpus, the trace-format/schema coupling).Nine things I did not invent
Marked DECIDE inline. They need product judgement, and guessing them would have been worse than leaving them open:
.loop/is gitignored, so it needs a tracked homeneeds-humanlabel enough?AminChiraziUntil each is resolved the loops treat that area as out of scope, which is the safe default rather than a blocker.
An invariant verified rather than asserted
Invariant 2 says replay never requires an API key. I ran it instead of writing it down:
flowproof run scripts/demo/order-status.flow.yamlwithANTHROPIC_API_KEY,OPENAI_API_KEYandFLOWPROOF_AI_API_KEYall unset.It holds. But on a clean box it first failed with:
The real cause was the demo agent dying on
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'openai'— and its stderr was discarded, appearing in neither stdout norreport.json. Filed as #188.That's the same defect class as #187, on the same boundary: a real upstream failure presenting as a flowproof problem. Both join the milestone's exit criteria. Tier 2 will produce more of these, because a corpus of third-party agents fails in more ways than a demo does — which makes diagnostics quality load-bearing for the loops' own trustworthiness, not polish.
Verification
AminChirazi, refusesloop-bot.constitutioncheck is now a required status check, so this PR exercises it for real.Host tooling added while verifying:
pip3,uv(perCONTRIBUTING.md), and theopenaipackage the demo agent needs.🤖 Generated with Claude Code