Tenchi

Production Python backends with explicit architecture and machine-verifiable changes.

Tenchi is a contract-first framework for backends that humans and coding agents can build together. It keeps the HTTP server, typed client, OpenAPI, application tools, use cases, and compatibility checks aligned around the same declarations.

Tenchi optimizes for what happens after the first endpoint: the application grows, infrastructure changes, an agent edits several layers at once, and you still need to know whether the result is wired correctly and safe to ship.

The model stays deliberately Python-native: Pydantic at the boundary, plain async functions for behavior, typing.Protocol for ports, frozen dataclasses for context, Starlette for ASGI, and httpx for client I/O. There is no dependency-injection container, base controller, ORM, queue, scheduler, or model runtime hidden inside the framework.

Pre-1.0 software. Tenchi is ready for evaluation and real application feedback, but minor releases may change public APIs. Read stability and releases before adopting it for a long-lived service.

Documentation · Quickstart · Comparisons

Start in five commands

Tenchi requires Python 3.12 or newer. Create a complete application with uv:

uvx tenchi new my_app
cd my_app
uv sync
uv run tenchi check
uv run tenchi dev

The generated application is intentionally more than a hello-world route. It includes a working todos feature, SQLite persistence, a memory test adapter, direct use-case and HTTP tests, OpenAPI and other boundary snapshots, CI, a repository-owned verification policy, and an AGENTS.md guide that gives coding agents the same workflow.

While the server runs, create a todo from another terminal:

curl -i \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"title":"Buy milk"}' \
  http://127.0.0.1:8000/todos

Open Swagger UI, follow the complete quickstart, or build a persisted feature end to end.

Adding Tenchi to an existing project starts with uv add tenchi; the existing-project guide builds the first contract, use case, context, route, ASGI application, test, and OpenAPI baseline.

One architecture, several entrypoints

Tenchi keeps transport and infrastructure around the application instead of inside it:

HTTP contract ─────┐
Application tool ──┼──> plain async use case ──> app-owned ports ──> adapters
Job / task / script┘

A Pydantic model defines boundary data:

# app/features/todos/schemas.py
from pydantic import BaseModel, Field


class CreateTodo(BaseModel):
    title: str = Field(min_length=1)


class Todo(BaseModel):
    id: str
    title: str
    completed: bool

A contract owns the HTTP method, path, inputs, response, errors, and metadata:

# app/features/todos/contracts.py
from tenchi.contracts import contract

from .schemas import CreateTodo, Todo


create_todo_contract = contract(
    method="POST",
    path="/todos",
    request=CreateTodo,
    response=Todo,
    status=201,
)

The use case owns behavior and depends only on an app-defined context:

# app/features/todos/use_cases/create_todo.py
from app.server.context import AppContext

from ..schemas import CreateTodo, Todo


async def create_todo(request: CreateTodo, context: AppContext) -> Todo:
    return await context.todos.create(title=request.title)

The route makes the binding explicit:

# app/features/todos/routes.py
from tenchi.routes import route, route_group

from .contracts import create_todo_contract
from .use_cases.create_todo import create_todo


routes = route_group(
    route(create_todo_contract, create_todo),
)

route() checks the use-case signature against the contract during application composition. At runtime, Tenchi validates the request before behavior runs and the response before its scoped context commits. The same contract drives the async Python client and OpenAPI 3.1, so those surfaces cannot quietly drift.

The mental model and application architecture explain where contracts, policies, ports, adapters, and composition belong as the app grows.

Verification is part of the framework

Tenchi gives people, agents, and CI one completion loop:

# Inspect declarations, registrations, dependencies, and diagnostics.
uv run tenchi map --feature todos

# After declaring complete_todo_contract, preview its use-case boundary.
uv run tenchi make use-case todos complete_todo \
  --from-contract app.features.todos.contracts:complete_todo_contract \
  --dry-run --json

# Check the current application.
uv run tenchi check

# Compare the finished tree with an immutable historical commit.
uv run tenchi verify --base-ref origin/main --json

tenchi check runs formatting, linting, Pyright, pytest, architecture checks, and exact boundary-snapshot checks. tenchi verify also requires a complete application map, compares public boundaries and verification policy with the selected Git commit, and binds its receipt to the exact source tree it observed.

OpenAPI, durable job messages, application tools, and AI evaluation policy each have canonical manifests and directional compatibility reports. Breaking and unknown changes fail; additive and metadata changes remain visible for review. Contract-driven change plans can additionally require exact generated files, bindings, and pytest execution evidence in the final receipt. That evidence is reported by the project's pytest process, so it protects the cooperative human/agent workflow from incomplete work but is not a tamper-proof attestation against malicious project-owned plugins or test code. Use externally owned hidden tests when the code producer is adversarial.

Tenchi cannot prove that an application's business rules are correct. It can prove which checks ran against which source, reject invalid wiring before traffic arrives, and prevent a changed snapshot or weakened gate from hiding an incompatible change.

Inspection, generator-preview, discovery, diagnostic, execution, check, and verification results support versioned, payload-safe JSON. tenchi mcp serves the same inspection, preview, compatibility, check, and verification operations to MCP-aware coding agents over stdio. Generated applications register that server in .mcp.json.

Read the coding-agent workflow, connect the coding-agent MCP server, and verify a generated change.

AI features are application features

Tenchi does not own models, prompts, agent loops, memory, or retrieval. Those choices sit behind app-owned ports. Tenchi makes the resulting capabilities safe to expose and possible to verify.

An application tool binds a stable machine-facing contract to an ordinary use case:

from app.shared.errors import unauthorized
from tenchi.tools import tool, tool_group, tool_handler

from .schemas import Project
from .use_cases.list_projects import list_projects


search_projects_tool = tool(
    "projects.search",
    result=list[Project],
    description="List projects owned by the authenticated user.",
    errors=(unauthorized,),
    read_only=True,
    open_world=False,
)

tools = tool_group(
    tool_handler(search_projects_tool, list_projects),
)

The runner validates input and output, supplies identity through application context rather than model-controlled arguments, exposes only declared errors, and masks unexpected failures. The same tool group can serve an in-process agent or an authenticated application MCP server with caller-specific discovery and explicit approval for destructive calls.

Typed evaluation cases add application-owned metrics, deadlines, and optional token and cost budgets. Evaluation policy is snapshotted separately from model execution, so historical verification can detect a removed case, lowered threshold, or expanded budget without running a provider.

Read application tools, serve tools over MCP, and AI evaluations. The Fieldnotes example shows the complete pattern in a cited research backend that runs without model credentials by default.

Production concerns have an explicit home

Tenchi supplies application-level boundaries and leaves infrastructure choices to the application:

• HTTP: typed requests, successful responses and headers, declared errors, media types, deadlines, pagination, a runtime client, and OpenAPI.
• Identity: boundary authentication hooks, context enrichment, pure policy functions, and authorization in use cases.
• Reliability: transaction patterns, idempotency, rate limits, bounded outbound retries, signed webhooks, and queue-neutral job messages.
• Operations: health routes, read-only deployment preflight, validated operational tasks, payload-safe outcomes, and an OpenTelemetry bridge.
• Testing: direct use-case tests, lifespan-aware in-process HTTP and typed clients, and adapter conformance suites for stateful primitives.

Your application still chooses its database, ORM or driver, identity provider, queue, scheduler, cache, exporters, model providers, and deployment platform. The production handbook connects those choices to transactions, concurrency, retries, background work, observability, and deployment.

When Tenchi fits

Choose Tenchi for a long-lived typed JSON API when:

• server behavior, Python clients, OpenAPI, and AI-facing tools must remain aligned;
• the same behavior must run through HTTP, jobs, tasks, scripts, or tools;
• explicit dependencies and application structure are worth modest up-front ceremony; and
• humans and agents need the same machine-checkable completion evidence.

Choose another framework when you need WebSockets, HTML templates, an ORM, admin UI, background runtime, or a large integration ecosystem as built-in features. Read the framework comparison for a candid comparison with FastAPI, Starlette, Litestar, and Django Ninja.

Read next

• Quickstart
• Build a feature end to end
• Contracts
• Use cases and ports
• Testing
• Production handbook
• Coding agents
• Module reference

The generated todos app teaches the core model. The standalone taskboard app exercises capabilities together under realistic pressure.

Development

uv sync
uv run ruff format --check .
uv run ruff check .
uv run pyright
uv run pytest

The documentation is a separate Next.js application in docs/. Run bun install and bun run check from that directory to lint, type-check, test, and build the static site.

Tenchi is available under the MIT License.