nt-child chain, deterministic replay) | <5 mins (5 exit codes, zero-dependency verifier, portable tar.zst bundle) |

Key Findings:

• Content-addressed journaling eliminates mutable log drift and guarantees artifact integrity.
• Deterministic policy merging reduces ambiguous governance tickets to inspectable, version-controlled TOML/JSON outputs.
• Offline-verifiable AGEF bundles decouple audit review from the original development environment, enabling external compliance validation without toolchain dependencies.

Core Solution

Akmon is a single Rust binary engineered for environments where AI reasoning, tool calls, and file changes must be cryptographically reviewable. It operates in interactive TUI or headless --task mode, writing a tamper-evident, content-addressed audit chain to .akmon/audit/<session-id>.jsonl and a structured evidence summary to .akmon/evidence/<session-id>.json. Sessions are deterministically replayable, diff-comparable, redactable, and exportable as portable AGEF bundles.

Architecture & Runtime:

• Single explicit binary eliminates plugin runtime drift and host environment mismatches.
• Reproducible across laptops, CI runners, hardened SSH hosts, and air-gapped networks.
• Supports Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Groq, Azure OpenAI, Bedrock, OpenAI-compatible endpoints, and Ollama. Operator-controlled model selection with no hosted runtime.

Policy Engine (Deterministic Merge): Policy resolves through four fixed precedence layers:

1. Built-in profile (dev, staging, prod)
2. Policy packs (.akmon/policy-packs/*.toml|json)
3. Project-local policy (.akmon/policy.toml|json)
4. CLI override (--policy-override) List fields append and deduplicate, preserving last-occurrence order. Effective policy is inspectable before execution.

Open Evidence Format (AGEF): AGEF (Agent Governance Evidence Format) is an open spec (v0.1.1, wire 0.1) enabling portable, offline verification. Bundles are tar.zst archives containing:

• manifest.json (session metadata, policy snapshot, model/provider config)
• events.bin (length-delimited canonical CBOR event stream)
• objects/<hex>/ (content-addressed artifacts)

Implementation Pipeline:

# Run a small headless task in your project.
cd your-project
akmon --yes --output json --task "summarize failing tests and propose minimal fixes" | tee run.json

# Verify the tamper-evident audit chain for the session.
akmon audit verify .akmon/audit/<session-id>.jsonl

# Verify the evidence schema and the linkage to the audit chain.
akmon evidence verify .akmon/evidence/<session-id>.json

# Enforce a single-run SLO check.
akmon slo verify .akmon/evidence/<session-id>.json --strict

# Detect regressions vs a historical baseline.
akmon slo trend .akmon/evidence/<session-id>.json \
  --baseline-dir .akmon/evidence/history \
  --window 20 \
  --strict

akmon policy show-effective --profile prod \
  --policy-pack .akmon/policy-packs/org.toml \
  --policy-pack .akmon/policy-packs/team.toml

Pitfall Guide

1. Confusing Logs with Evidence: Logs are mutable developer artifacts. Evidence must be reviewer-centric, tamper-evident, and autonomously answer the five audit questions without human reconstruction.
2. Ignoring Event Chain Linkage: Flat logs cannot establish causality. You must maintain ordered, parent-linked event chains to trace filesystem mutations back to specific tool calls and model responses.
3. Relying on Plugin Runtimes or Hosted SaaS: Runtime drift and environment mismatches break reproducibility. Use a single, explicit binary to guarantee identical behavior across laptops, CI runners, and air-gapped hosts.
4. Ad-Hoc Policy Management: Policy must be deterministic. Use the 4-layer merge strategy (profile → packs → local → CLI) and always verify the effective policy before execution to eliminate ambiguous governance tickets.
5. Expecting AI Governance to Prevent Misbehavior: Governance does not guarantee model correctness. It bounds, observes, and proves the consequences of model behavior, enabling controlled rollback, audit, and compliance reporting.
6. Overlooking Offline Bundle Verification: Audit trails must travel. Ensure your evidence format (e.g., AGEF) can be verified by external reviewers without requiring the original toolchain, repository access, or network connectivity.

Deliverables

• Blueprint: Akmon Architecture & AGEF Spec. Covers single-binary runtime design, content-addressed journal substrate, CBOR event stream serialization, policy merge algorithm, and tar.zst bundle structure (manifest.json, events.bin, objects/<hex>/).
• Checklist: 5-Command Trust Pipeline & Compliance Validation. Includes task execution, audit chain verification, evidence schema validation, SLO enforcement, regression trending, policy inspection, and offline reviewer bundle verification steps.
• Configuration Templates:
  • Policy TOML/JSON structure (profile definitions, pack inheritance, local overrides, CLI flag mapping)
  • AGEF Bundle Manifest schema (session metadata, provider/model config, policy snapshot, artifact checksums, event stream pointers)
  • CI gate integration examples (exit code routing, baseline directory setup, strict SLO enforcement)