sg-core 0.1.1

SluiceGate Open Core

SluiceGate Open Core

This directory contains the SluiceGate Open Core: a pure, deterministic policy engine for governing actions taken by autonomous systems (AI agents, services, workflows, humans-in-the-loop).

The Open Core is intentionally side-effect free. It evaluates requests against policy, returns decisions and obligations, and emits audit events — but it does not execute actions, send emails, or integrate with vendors.

Those behaviors belong in adapters (demos, SDKs, enterprise deployments).

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WHAT THE OPEN CORE IS

• A policy evaluation engine
• A decision point for agent actions
• A governance control plane, not an approval workflow
• A library, not a service

Given a request, the core returns:

• a decision: ALLOW, PAUSE, or BLOCK
• a policy provenance hash
• zero or more structured obligations (e.g. require_approval)
• optional audit events (via a callback)

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WHAT THE OPEN CORE IS NOT

• Not an email system
• Not a workflow engine
• Not a UI
• Not tied to HTTP, REST, or any transport
• Not opinionated about how obligations are enforced

Those concerns are deliberately kept outside the core.

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REPOSITORY STRUCTURE

open-core/ ├── pyproject.toml ├── README.md ├── src/ │ └── sg_core/ │ ├── init.py │ ├── adapters.py │ ├── decision_loop.py │ ├── models.py │ ├── obligation_adapter.py │ ├── pause_api.py │ ├── policy.py │ └── py.typed ├── examples/ │ └── run_local_decision.py ├── policies/ │ └── example-policy.yml └── tests/ (future pytest tests)

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PUBLIC API (BETA-STABLE)

The primary entrypoint is the Gate object.

Import pattern:

from sg_core import Gate, PolicyEngine, GateRequest

Key methods:

• Gate.evaluate(request) Returns a GateDecision (decision + obligations + policy hash)

• Gate.explain(request) Returns an ExplainResult (decision + obligations + full trace) This is a pure simulation with no side effects.

The core never performs execution or notification.

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DEVELOPMENT SETUP (USING UV)

Prerequisites:

• Python 3.11 or newer
• uv installed (https://github.com/astral-sh/uv)

Setup steps:

cd open-core uv sync uv pip install -e .

Sanity check:

uv run python -c "import sg_core; print('sg_core import ok')"

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RUNNING THE EXAMPLE HARNESS

The example harness runs a set of policy test cases entirely in-process.

It demonstrates:

• rule matching
• ALLOW vs PAUSE decisions
• default fallback behavior
• obligation generation
• policy provenance hashing
• explain / trace output per request

Run it with:

uv run -m examples.run_local_decision

The harness prints both the decision and the explain trace for each test.

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POLICY DSL

Policies are defined as YAML files under the policies/ directory.

They operate over four top-level request domains:

• actor
• action
• target
• context

Rules are evaluated top-to-bottom. All conditions within a rule must match (AND-only in Beta). The first matching rule wins; otherwise the policy default applies.

See docs/Policy_DSL.md at the repo root for the full DSL specification.

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EXPLAIN MODE (POLICY SIMULATION)

Gate.explain() provides a pure, side-effect-free evaluation trace, including:

• which rule matched (or default)
• which conditions passed or failed
• actual vs expected values
• resulting decision and obligations

Explain mode is intended for:

• policy authoring
• debugging
• audit review
• UI visualization
• dry-run simulations

Explain mode does not emit audit events or execute anything.

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OBLIGATIONS AND ADAPTERS

The Open Core returns obligations as data:

Obligation(type="require_approval", data={...})

How those obligations are enforced is left to adapters.

A minimal adapter interface (ObligationAdapter) is defined, but the core never invokes it automatically. This preserves purity and extensibility.

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AGENT ADAPTERS / WEBSOCKETS / FASTAPI ENDPOINTS

-PollingPauseAdapter (sync) -AsyncPollingPauseAdapter (async)

They implement the “if PAUSE → wait → resume with ALLOW or BLOCK” pattern in one reusable component (so PAUSE is not treated as an error.)

“Wait” without polling: SSE + WebSocket

-SSE: GET /pause/{token}/events Streams event: pause messages with JSON payloads; auto-closes when resolved/expired.

-WebSocket: WS /ws/pause/{token} Sends initial state then pushes updates; closes on resolved/expired.

FastAPI endpoints

GET /pause/{token} → returns { pause: ..., decision: ... } GET /pause/{token}/decision → returns the current decision (PAUSE|ALLOW|BLOCK) POST /pause/{token}/approve body: { "approver": "...", "comment": "..." } POST /pause/{token}/deny body: { "approver": "...", "comment": "..." }

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DESIGN PRINCIPLES

• Deterministic
• Declarative
• Transport-agnostic
• Side-effect free
• Explicit separation of decision and execution
• Extensible without modifying core logic

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LICENSE

See LICENSE.md at the repo root.

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STATUS

Beta.

The core API and Policy DSL are considered stable for experimentation and early adoption. Future versions may add features in a backward-compatible manner.