Documentation

Covenant is an open, agent-native operating layer. It runs locally on the host and exposes eight operating-layer primitives (intent, runtime, memory, identity, permissions, comms, compositor, and settlement) through which human users, software agents, and tools coordinate work, share state, and settle usage.

The documentation is organized into concepts, architecture, reference, protocols, and operations. The Getting started guide covers installation and an end-to-end intent dispatch; Concepts establishes the model referenced throughout the remainder of the documentation.

Browse by area

Getting started

Install the daemon, register an agent, and dispatch a first intent.

Concepts

Intents, agents, capabilities, memory, audit, and settlement.

Autonomous workflow

Task lifecycle, continuation, validation gates, and sprint summaries.

Validation profile

Operating surfaces, evidence requirements, and live boundary checks.

Alpha release contract

Source-alpha boundary, evidence bundle requirements, and human-owned release decisions.

Architecture

Architecture of the daemon, runtime, local control plane, and settlement scaffold.

Command-line interface

Reference for every covenant subcommand, including arguments and exit codes.

HTTP API

Routes, request schemas, and response shapes for the local HTTP gateway.

Agent manifest

Schema, runtime contract, and validation rules for the agent.toml manifest.

Capability tokens

ed25519-signed permission tokens: structure, canonical encoding, verification, and revocation.

MCP integration

The Tool trait, native tools, and integration with external MCP servers over JSON-RPC.

Security model

Trust boundaries, threat model, defaults, and operator responsibilities.

Provenance

Commit-scoped envelopes for autonomy tasks, changed file evidence, and validation records.

Live coverage

Opt-in real-boundary test inventory across daemon, CLI, A2A, MCP, runtime, and model surfaces.

Linux gVisor runner

Repeatable Linux host setup for the opt-in runsc sandbox validation path.

Status

Covenant is pre-1.0 systems infrastructure. The local daemon, CLI, TUI, identity, permissions, memory, audit, peer auth, budget, and local receipt ledger are implemented in the repository. MCP, A2A, the local web console, autonomous workflow records, live coverage matrix, and provenance envelopes are actively hardening. Runtime isolation includes manifest-level requirements, trusted-local fail-closed behavior, daemon-selectable Linux gVisor configuration, runtime-level gVisor runner work, live Linux sandbox coverage, and a documented Linux runner setup. Distributed settlement, installers, SDK publication, release-scope and audit-root signing, and transparency publication are tracked on the roadmap.

For the design rationale, read the technical paper; the implementation lives on GitHub.

Position in the stack

Covenant operates between the host operating system and user-facing agentic applications. It provides identity, permissions, memory, communication, and settlement as shared, host-level services, allowing language models, agent frameworks, and end-user applications to integrate against a common substrate rather than reimplement these primitives independently.