strato

The agent OS — the stratosphere layer, the stable contract above tropo's churn. If tropo is what's true, strato is how an agent works over it: a per-turn loop, one visible state surface, human gates, and the self-improvement that compounds across sessions.

strato is throughline and flywheel fused — they are one loop at two speeds:

• Per turn (throughline): Ask → retrieve → act → verify → learn → gate, the FW/WS/PRIV/VS/Gate grammar, the visible State Surface, human gates.
• Per heartbeat (flywheel): distill what the loop learned into durable memory, a bug-risk playbook (self-healing), and skills extracted on a workflow's third occurrence; audit workspace hygiene.

Design law: strato must be tiny to load. The only always-on file is STRATO.md; templates load once at bootstrap, module index.md files route progressively, and the procedures load on demand from the skill. One fact gets one owner; links beat copies.

Layout

How it's used

strato is the framework; a workspace is the instance. create-vivary lays the templates down, and the strato skill runs bootstrap, heartbeat, and self-improve. The workspace's own AGENTS.md is distinct from Vivary's root AGENTS.md, which governs agents working on Vivary itself.

The runtime facade is deliberately opt-in:

strato decide --governed --json request.json

It validates the request schema, pinned policy version, core-owned actor and authority class, workspace binding, absolute scope roots bound to the Task Capsule, the capsule's deterministic identifier and body fingerprint, and caller-supplied timestamps before delegating the budget/gate/next-loop decision to vivary-core. The compiler and verifier share the JavaScript-lossless max_claims bound; fabricated capsule IDs, missing compiler-owned fields, malformed task scopes, and non-canonical or numerically lossy capsule values fail closed. Requests, capsule observations, and receipts have a deterministic 300-second freshness window. A verdict is accepted only beside its receipt. A malformed, invalid, altered, or unsafely nested envelope returns a vivary.strato-decision-refusal/v0 document and exit 2; a valid envelope returns vivary.strato-decision/v0, is advisory, and exits 0. Add --strict to exit 1 when core blocks or requests a gate. Unknown fields and non-string Python mapping keys are rejected, so free-form status text cannot impersonate a human gate. Omit --json for a short text summary. The full contract is in the command reference.

Loop literacy — running the loop unattended — is strato's domain too; see the loops skill (.claude/skills/loops/).

Versioning

The vivary-strato Python distribution is at unpublished source version 0.1.2 and requires vivary-core>=0.2.4. Both remain unpublished during development and ship only through the final coordinated release gate. The templates and skills remain bundled by create-vivary; the runtime package does not duplicate or replace them.

From this checkout, install the unpublished pair without consulting a registry:

python -m pip install --no-deps ./packages/core ./packages/strato

Distilled from throughline + flywheel (Jeff's own repos, used read-only). Not a verbatim copy — the overlap (duplicate memory templates, gates, proactivity rules) is collapsed into one model.