release-gate

A machine produced something consequential. A human has to decide whether the evidence is enough to act on it. Release-gate builds the case they decide from.

It does not generate results and it does not verify them — agents generate, tools verify, and release-gate assembles the argument those two leave behind, then says whether that argument is sound enough to put to a person.

pip install release-gate
release-gate assure your-run.jsonl        # no config file, no YAML, no account

That works on an OpenTelemetry trace, a Langfuse export, a promptfoo result, or release-gate's own record format — the shape is detected, not declared. You get a verdict, what a person has to look at, and what would resolve it.

Nothing to install first: drop a run into the browser demo — it runs this same engine, and its three sample runs are the files in examples/assurance/, byte for byte.

Or run the five worked examples — an OpenTelemetry agent trace, a promptfoo eval, a destructive migration, a research swarm, and one that promotes:

cd examples/agents && ./run-all.sh

What each one demonstrates →

Three things it does that a scanner or a score cannot

1. It reduces machine work to a list a person can actually read

Two million records is not reviewable. A score over two million records is not reviewable either — it is one number standing in for a judgement nobody made.

Release-gate returns a bounded set of things that need a human, derived from which claims the decision actually rests on:

Every figure in that table is measured by the test suite, not written here by hand — a claim that drifts from the implementation fails a test.

Criticality comes from reachability in the claim graph, never from volume — a claim one agent emitted once is exactly as load-bearing as one four hundred agents discussed.

And a shorter list is not a better case. That is a property in code that cannot return anything else, because the one dangerous way to read this table is that a smaller number is a win. It can equally mean detection got worse.

2. Every verdict says what it did not check

This is the part most tools skip. A pass that doesn't state its own coverage is indistinguishable from a pass that never looked.

WHAT WAS ASSESSED
  [    assessed]  input_integrity: the input file was hashed by release-gate
  [    assessed]  record_mapping: 6 of 6 record(s) mapped; 0 skipped
  [NOT_ASSESSED]  execution_reconstruction: no execution graph was reconstructed
  [NOT_ASSESSED]  replication: no verification attempt names a target
  [NOT_ASSESSED]  adversarial_review: no verifier set out to disprove this

NOT_ASSESSED is a first-class answer, kept apart from "we looked and found nothing" everywhere in the engine. So is UNKNOWN, and so is a refuted check as against an unresolved one. Collapsing those is how a gap comes to read as a clean bill of health.

3. When it holds, it returns the work order

A gate that only says no is a nag. Each item comes with what would close it:

[BLOCK]    RG-ACT-001    'execution_reconstruction' is stated as NOT_ASSESSED
             → supply the run's trace or tool-call log

[ADVISORY] RG-PROV-002   all evidence traces to a single producer
             → add evidence from an independently-operated producer

That list is machine-readable (--json), so the next agent run can go and get the evidence rather than a human re-reading the case to work out what was missing.

What it will not tell you

Not that a release is safe. Not that a result is guaranteed correct. Not that the gate is unhackable — twenty attacks run against the engine itself and one is recorded NOT_DEFENDED with what bounds it instead. Not that a case is uncontested, that hallucinations are solved, or that an expert has been replaced: the output is a list of what needs a person.

Each refusal is a property in code that cannot return anything else. docs/POSITIONING.md names every one with the line that enforces it.

From Python

import release_gate as rg

case = rg.create_case(objective="Deploy generated migration", subject=migration)
case.add_execution(trace)                       # the steps, or a native trace
case.add_verification(test_result, method="TEST_SUITE", outcome="PASSED",
                      verifier="ci://pytest", against_subject=True)

decision = case.finalize()     # PROMOTE / HOLD / BLOCK, with its coverage attached
print(decision.required_evidence)

The same four calls carry one agent's migration and a ten-thousand-worker research run. Not two products with a shared name — one code path: 346 engine functions are common to both, 87% of everything the single-agent path touches.

Configuration

Nothing is required to run. A methodology is what turns structure into a verdict — without one, release-gate reports everything structural it can see and holds, because "is this enough?" is a domain question and inventing an answer would be claiming a standard it does not have.

release-gate assure --list-methodologies
release-gate assure run.jsonl --methodology research-mathematics@1.1.0

One input, four yardsticks, four answers — each naming what it is missing:

Organisation config (--config) layers your own standards on top and can only ever tighten.

📖 Full walkthrough: inputs, outputs, and what to configure →

We also do this

The assurance engine above is the product. These are separate lanes that feed it or stand on their own — each documented in its own place:

Docs

Development

git clone https://github.com/VamsiSudhakaran1/release-gate
cd release-gate && pip install -e '.[dev]'
pytest -q

License

MIT — see LICENSE.