transient-trace 0.1.0a3

Python SDK for transient trace ATP reference implementation

transient-trace

Governance SDK for AI agents. Intercepts, evaluates, and audits every action an agent takes — with policy enforcement, tamper-evident receipts, and a self-learning rule engine.

Install

pip install transient-trace

For development (editable install — picks up source changes immediately):

pip install -e /path/to/transient-trace-py

Quickstart

The fastest path to governed agents is the wrap command. It installs a persistent shell shim so every invocation of the binary goes through governance automatically — no prefix required.

# Wrap Claude Code and add shims to your shell RC file
transient-trace wrap install claude --auto-rc

# Restart your shell (or source the RC file)
source ~/.zshrc

That's it. Every claude invocation is now governed with a full receipt trail.

# Check governance is active
transient-trace wrap status

# View recent receipts
transient-trace receipts list --since 30m

# Summary with deny rate
transient-trace receipts summary --since 1h

---

Documentation

Document	Description
Quickstart	Get governance running in under five minutes
CLI Reference	All commands, flags, and environment variables
Policy Format	Writing and testing governance policies
How It Works	Architecture, interception model, trust boundaries
Receipts	Audit trail, tamper detection, agent self-check

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Enforce a policy

By default, transient-trace runs in audit mode — records everything, blocks nothing. To enforce a policy, switch to strict mode:

cat > my-policy.json << 'EOF'
{
  "version": 1,
  "defaultAction": "deny",
  "rules": [
    { "id": "allow-git",       "action": "allow", "actionClasses": ["read", "write_low"] },
    { "id": "allow-anthropic", "action": "allow", "actionClasses": ["network"],
      "hosts": ["api.anthropic.com"] }
  ]
}
EOF

transient-trace run --mode strict --policy "$(cat my-policy.json)" claude -p "..."

Or set strict mode as the permanent default:

transient-trace config set mode strict

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How transient-trace intercepts agent actions

transient-trace uses three complementary interception layers:

1. PATH shims — thin bash scripts for git, curl, and other monitored binaries are prepended to PATH. Shell-resolved calls are caught here.

2. Popen hook — sitecustomize.py is injected via PYTHONPATH into every Python subprocess. It monkey-patches subprocess.Popen to catch calls that use absolute binary paths, bypassing PATH. This is why transient-trace works inside Claude Code without any changes to Claude Code itself.

3. Inherited environment — both mechanisms are inherited by child processes, giving coverage across nested agents and subprocesses.

See How It Works for the full architecture.

---

Python SDK (low-level)

For direct integration into Python agents:

from transient_trace import Client_init

policy = {
    "version": 1,
    "defaultAction": "allow",
    "rules": [{"id": "allow-all", "action": "allow"}]
}

client = Client_init({"agentId": "my-agent", "policy": policy})

result = client.executeActionWithReceipt(
    lambda: {"ok": True},
    {"target": "resource-1", "action_class": "write_low"}
)

print(result["receipt"]["receipt_id"])       # TR-...
print(result["receipt"]["outcome"])          # allow
print(result["receipt"]["signature"]["alg"]) # Ed25519

If policy returns deny, raises RuntimeError: Denied: <reason_code>.

Key differences from the TypeScript SDK

• Synchronous API — no await, no asyncio
• Config is a dict — Client_init({"agentId": "..."}), not keyword args
• Default policy is deny-all — pass a policy or set ATP_POLICY_PATH

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Building sdist / wheel (macOS, external drives)

Setuptools writes a staging directory under the current working directory. On exFAT/FAT32 volumes (many external SSDs), macOS creates AppleDouble ._* metadata files during staging — cleanup then fails and python -m build errors out.

Fix: build from an APFS temp path:

./scripts/build_release.sh

Or copy the repo to ~/Developer (APFS) and run python -m build there.

To remove stray ._* files: ./scripts/clean_macos_artifacts.sh

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Interoperability with TypeScript SDK

Receipt signatures are cross-verifiable — a receipt signed by the Python SDK can be verified by the TypeScript SDK and vice versa.

• Canonicalization: RFC 8785 JCS (both SDKs, action receipts)
• Signing: Ed25519 via PyNaCl (Python) / @noble/curves (TypeScript)
• Session receipts: legacy deep-sort canonicalization (both SDKs, phase 1 parity)