Canon

The governance runtime for AI-assisted engineering. Keep AI agents bounded, inspectable, and safely restricted to approved work zones.

🚀 Why Canon?

• 🚫 No Opaque Loops: You control exactly when agents plan, run, and publish.
• 🛡️ Bounded Execution: Agents operate strictly within approved risk and zone limits.
• 🔍 Inspectable State: Every decision, approval, and output is captured as durable evidence.
• 📖 Governed Packets: Turn unstructured chat into canonical, versioned markdown artifacts.

🧠 How it Works

Canon operates on a simple, predictable four-step mental model:

1. init -> Prepare the workspace.
2. run -> Start a governed session with explicit boundaries.
3. approve -> Review and unblock the agent when human judgment is needed.
4. publish -> Promote the final artifacts into your repository's permanent memory.

⚡ Quick Start

Get your first governed session running in seconds:

brew tap apply-the/canon && brew install canon
cd my-project
canon init
canon run --mode requirements --risk bounded-impact

In supported interactive terminals, canon init now opens a guided assistant selector by default. Use canon init --non-interactive for scripts, CI, or machine-readable output such as --output json. The guided selector includes Codex, Copilot, Claude, Cursor, and Antigravity.

The public documentation is aligned with 0.64.0. Where the site links back to repository source, it now points at the 0.64.0 release line.

Canon now publishes governed_reasoning_posture_v2 as the current stable reasoning-posture contract for downstream consumers. The new line keeps Canon as the semantic owner while making selector shape, independence minima, confidence handoff, provenance, compatibility windows, and active-versus-legacy migration rules explicit and fail-closed.

🛠️ Key Commands

These are the commands you'll actually use every day:

Command	What it does
canon run	Start a new governed session with explicit boundaries.
canon status	See exactly what the agent is doing right now.
canon inspect	Review generated evidence and artifacts.
canon approve	Unblock a session that hit a governance gate.
canon publish	Commit the final work into your repository.

📚 Deep Dive Documentation

For advanced integrations, semantics, and architecture, explore the tech-docs/ folder:

• Getting Started Guide
• Governance Modes
• Risk and Authority Zones
• Machine-Facing Governance Adapter

🤝 Contributing

Want to build or develop Canon itself? See CONTRIBUTING.md. Use the GitHub issue templates under .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/ when reporting bugs or feature requests. For vulnerabilities, follow SECURITY.md.