Evidence-backed agent systems and deterministic substrates.
Aligning agent execution with charter specifications, grounded in logbook evidence.
Start here to explore the deterministic governance substrate through three primary lenses:
The evidence base. Twenty-six primary papers covering grounded systems, orchestration architecture, and local LLM operator judgment.
Explore Research →Live validation environment. Firmware validators for future hardware and physics microscopes for legacy sensor forensic data.
Enter Simulation Lab →Real-world evidence. Geographic TSP scale ladders and solver-backed orchestration proofs demonstrating where correctness must live.
View Benchmarks →Bulkhead τ is the public release line for a deterministic expert system built as personal consultant tooling for complex implementations. The system does not attempt to expand model capabilities; instead, it enforces governance by bounding execution between a formal specification Charter above and an append-only evidence Logbook below.
Rather than relying on non-deterministic language models for runtime control, Bulkhead τ embeds those models inside a strict deterministic substrate. This ensures all operations are fully auditable, bounded, and governed by explicit architectural boundaries.
Specification Standard. Evaluated against Product Behavior Contract specifications (.pbc.md), which define target behavior patterns and routing constraints. PBC is maintained by stewie-sh. We actively contribute provider-neutral anchoring guidance upstream and canonically consume these specifications downstream. Every architectural and operational decision routes through the contract question: Does this behavior fit the charter?
Core Substrate. A custom, deterministic expert system built locally for implementation engagements, layered on the open-source tau-bench foundation (originally authored by Sierra Research, licensed under the MIT License). Operates under a strict supervisor/implementer pattern, utilizing cross-audit agent rotation, phase discipline, and a four-phase execution framework (Glass Box → Human-in-the-Loop → Progressive Disclosure → Multi-Modal Output).
Evidence & Deliberation. Anchored in the intellectual lineage of the gt-kb codebase authored by Mike Palmeter (Remaker Digital). Bulkhead τ implements a parallel, consultant-scale logbook design that inherits (a) first-class priority for deliberation records, (b) the logbook vocabulary, and (c) strict append-only discipline. It uses custom local Markdown finding files in our memory system rather than an SQLite database. It remains structurally separate from GroundTruth (the productized platform successor to the gt-kb lineage).
Operational safety is maintained by separating historical governance milestones from current evidence-derived states through an active trust loop:
stewie-sh.Provenance note: The PBC anchoring path is upstream-aligned through provider-neutral specification guidelines. The trust-state verification logic is a custom parallel implementation, inheriting its conceptual structure from the gt-kb design.