Unclassified

14 — Hermes, Execution, Sync, and Reconciliation

Status: Canonical; implementation and end-to-end proof vary

Governed execution

User or Twin intent
→ Capability Resolver
→ immutable execution plan
→ Governance policy and evidence check
→ human approval where required
→ approval token
→ Hermes
→ provider connector / MCP capability
→ source-system result
→ Pipeline normalisation
→ promoted Spine outcome
→ projection invalidation
→ reconciliation and user-visible status

Hermes is the sole coordinator of approved external execution. Gateway and UI
must not invoke provider APIs directly after approval.

Execution plan

The plan fixes:

  • actor, account, tenant, and intent;
  • capability and version;
  • provider route and resource scope;
  • inputs and expected effects;
  • idempotency key;
  • evidence and risk classification;
  • policy result and required approver;
  • expiry and cancellation conditions;
  • verification and reconciliation strategy.

Approval authorises that plan, not an open-ended future action.

Sync

Sync reconciles resulting state across source systems and the Spine. It supports
initial hydration, incremental cursors, webhooks, scheduled pulls, retry,
backfill, and explicit repair.

Source systems remain authoritative for their native execution outcomes.
Pipeline promotes the normalised, evidenced result into canonical Spine state.

Failure cases

The runtime must handle:

  • denied or expired approval;
  • missing or stale connector binding;
  • insufficient provider scope;
  • duplicate request;
  • provider timeout or partial success;
  • callback loss after provider success;
  • schema incompatibility;
  • reconciliation conflict;
  • revocation during execution;
  • retry exhaustion and operator escalation.

Reconciliation receipt

Every completed or failed action records provider receipt, normalised outcome,
before/after evidence, verification result, canonical promotion state, projection
invalidation, and any remaining conflict.

User experience

Execution status is visible in the Workbench. A chat response is not sufficient
evidence that an action occurred.