Autonomous workflow

Covenant treats autonomous maintenance as an operating-layer surface. Work is represented as task records, transition events, validation evidence, and handoff summaries rather than private chat state.

Lifecycle

proposed -> triaged -> planned -> in_progress -> self_review -> validation -> ready -> integrated

Security-sensitive or broad changes can add cross_review or move through repair. A task enters blocked only when a human-only input is actually required.

Control surface

  • agent-os/autonomy/workflow.json — states, roles, gates, transitions, and definition of done.
  • agent-os/autonomy/tasks/*.json — scoped work records.
  • agent-os/autonomy/events.jsonl — append-only transition history.
  • agent-os/autonomy/backlog.json — durable seed queue used when no active task is ready.

Commands

node agent-os/scripts/autonomy-next.mjs node agent-os/scripts/autonomy-continue.mjs node agent-os/scripts/autonomy-seed-next.mjs --dry-run node agent-os/scripts/autonomy-transition.mjs <task-id> <state> --actor <role> --note "<why>" node agent-os/scripts/autonomy-summary.mjs --since 2026-05-09 node agent-os/scripts/autonomy-summary.mjs --format json node agent-os/scripts/validate-autonomy.mjs

Summary contract

autonomy-summary.mjs emits Markdown for human handoffs and JSON for monitors. It reports scoped task counts, state counts, active work, blocked work, recently integrated tasks, and recent transition events directly from tracked repository state.

Validation

  • Task records and transition logs are checked by validate-autonomy.mjs.
  • Git authors and committers are checked by validate-git-identity.mjs.
  • Commit evidence is checked by provenance.mjs verify-all.
  • Landing documentation must build with pnpm --dir landing build.

Related