- Capabilities declare access (read/write, unknown fails closed as
write), side effects, idempotency, timeout, cost estimate and the trust
of their output (web content is low trust). A capability may derive its
policy target from its parameters; a disagreeing target is refused, and
approvals whose modified parameters change the target are refused.
- The registry is frozen at start-up; registration afterwards panics.
- Invocation.RequireApproval turns ALLOW into ASK for commitments; it can
only tighten, and scoped grants never satisfy it.
- Scoped grants (migration 0025): capability, target and parameter globs,
access, expiry of at most seven days and an optional operation count
consumed atomically; applied only where policy says ASK. A sweep marks
lapsed grants and refreshes the self-model, which now lists live grants.
- Capability requests carry scope, duration, operation cap, reason,
evidence, risk, mitigation, fallback, alternatives and explicit decision
history; they batch per intention, are capped per mind (operator
attention budget) and can be decided only by a named person. Component
names are refused as deciders, for approvals too, and as usernames.
- API routes, OpenAPI entries, scheduler sweeps and approval-centre
sections for requests and temporary grants.
Phase 12 (ADR-0005). Capabilities are registered in code with parameter
schemas, risk classes and default effects; sudo_shell and delete_database
are locked to DENY and cannot be relaxed. Policies are scoped globally or
per mind with capability, target glob, action kind and optional hour
window; evaluation is deterministic, most specific wins, and ties go to
the stricter effect. Invoke is the single entry point: it refuses
dreaming and replay contexts, validates parameters (unknown keys, non
http URLs and path traversal rejected), evaluates policy and session
grants, hashes the exact request and records a policy_decision event.
ALLOW executes with timeout and panic isolation and turns textual output
into a tool-trust observation; ASK creates an approval request bound to
the hash with an alert notification; DENY is counted and recorded.
Operators approve once, approve for a time-boxed session grant, deny
with a note, or modify parameters (re-validated, re-hashed, original
kept in the append-only decision log). The self-model's capability list
is recomputed from effective policy on start and on every policy change.
The act process maps fetch requests to http.fetch and the action handler
invokes through the layer; replies report capabilities and outcomes.
Policy matrix and approval centre pages, dashboard count, API, CLI
(approvals, policy, invoke) and docs/capabilities.md.
Andy Dixon