Canonadr

ADR-2026-09-04-10 — Capability, Governance and Hermes remain separated

Status: ACCEPTED — 2026-09-04 (Founder Canon §18–20; Founder decision "no monolithic AI Orchestrator")

Context

Convenient designs collapse "decide what to do," "decide what may be done," and "get it done"
into one orchestrator. That produces an autonomous actor with unreviewable authority — the
exact failure the product must never have.

Decision

The responsibility split is frozen:

Twin / Workbench      = what the user is trying to achieve
Capability Discovery  = what executable options exist
Capability Fabric     = how it could be done (provider-neutral resolution)
Governance            = whether it may be done and under whose authority
Hermes                = how approved execution is coordinated reliably
Reconciliation        = whether reality actually changed as intended
  • Governance outcomes: ALLOW · DENY · REQUIRE APPROVAL · DELEGATE / ALLOW WITH BOUNDED
    AUTHORITY    . Confidence never grants authority; the Twin cannot self-approve consequential
    action.
  • Delegation is explicit, capability-scoped policy (BOUNDED_DELEGATION) — never implied by
    capability discovery.
  • Hermes starts only after a plan is approved or policy-allowed; it coordinates dispatch, waits,
    retries, timeouts, recovery/compensation, evidence capture, verification and reconciliation —
    and never owns canonical truth.
  • Execution providers may include APIs, MCP tools, agents, browser runtimes, workflows, local
    execution, AI models or human tasks. No product surface, agent, connector or capability
    implementation bypasses the owner of canonical composition, authority or mutation.

Alternatives considered

  • A monolithic AI orchestrator combining cognition + authority + execution — rejected:
    unreviewable authority, unbounded blast radius, vendor lock-in of the operating model.
  • Governance as a workflow step after execution — rejected: it is a cross-cutting boundary
    evaluated before any consequential action.

Consequences

Every capability declares version, contracts, authority scope, risk, execution/sync modes,
idempotency, evidence requirements, provider routes, health, timeout, retry, compensation and
verification behavior before it is executable. Middleware and gateways must not create implicit
approvals.