A model of volition that keeps wanting, intending and committing as
separate states (PLAN §8.2 items 1–6, 14):
- Wants (migration 0026) carry origin, strength with a six-hour
half-life, urgency, valence, drives, values, goal, commitment and an
optional proposed means. Derivation is deterministic and selective:
failed predictions, contradictions, operator goals, stalled goals,
questions and requests, and due commitments; drives and configured
values modulate strength with recorded terms; candidates below 0.35 are
not stored; identical subjects reinforce; faded and excess wants expire.
- Conflicts are first-class and resolved by explicit scores with no fixed
hierarchy: urgency scales strength, goals add priority, commitments add
normative weight; an approach opposed by a value-derived avoid want wins
outright only when clearly stronger, otherwise with a constraint or is
deferred. Neither side is discarded.
- Commitments (do/refrain with capability, target, access and risk
matchers, optional "unless approval", due, expiry, revocability) are
checked for due, overdue, impossible, conflicting and superseded states.
They constrain means and never grant authority.
- Formation weighs strength, urgency, goal, commitment, expected utility,
risk scaled by caution, cost, privacy and autonomy; it returns formed or
not formed with a reason (forbidden by commitment, denied, unavailable,
no possible plan, below threshold, capacity, duplicate, deferred), and a
commitment requiring approval turns an action into a request for
approval.
- Reconsideration maps triggers (denied or expired approval, capability or
commitment change, failed step or expectation, weakened belief, budget,
goal completion, world change, operator correction) to keep, block,
suspend, resume, replan, require approval, abandon or fulfil, with
bounded replanning.
- The store records every transition as an event and every choice in the
append-only volition_decisions ledger; fulfilling an intention satisfies
its wants and fulfils its commitment.
- Event vocabulary gains volition and plan categories.
Rows in append-only history are never deleted; their content can now be
made irrecoverable through one audited path. A redaction replaces the
content columns of an event, memory, message, model call, belief or
assertion with a fixed marker, keeps identifiers, links, timestamps,
scores and breakdowns, writes an append-only ledger row with a SHA-256 of
the removed content, appends a redaction event, optionally cascades to
derived rows and to the events that quote them, and scrubs stored snapshot
archives before re-signing them. noema_redact() is the only write the
append-only trigger admits, for UPDATE only, under a transaction-local flag
the application never sets; plain updates and all deletes stay refused.
Replay labels redacted stimuli instead of inventing them.
Cryptographic erasure was considered and deferred with reasons (ADR-0009);
docs/privacy.md defines retained, redacted, irrecoverable and deleted and
states what backups and earlier exports are not covered. Migration 0023.
Adds co_occurs_with, temporally_precedes, possibly_caused_by and
asserted_by to the relation vocabulary with Causal and Hypothetical
predicates. Entities mentioned together now co-occur rather than being
'related'; association hypotheses record possibly_caused_by and their
basis (temporal association only); caused_by is reserved for explicit
operator statements and nothing automatic writes it. Documented in
docs/graph.md and checked end to end.
- TOTP second factor (RFC 6238, secret encrypted under the master key),
ten hashed single-use recovery codes, two-step login with a pending token
bound to the client address, account enrolment/disable, admin reset
- tests/security: prompt-injection corpus never acts or creates evidence-free
beliefs; roles and CSRF on form and API paths; cross-mind isolation
(demo scenario 5); stored-XSS escaping and CSP across pages; secrets never
echoed (API, pages, database, archives); hostile archive import; session
lifecycle and security headers
- OpenAPI 3.1 document generated from the route table, served at
/api/v1/openapi.json and kept complete by a test
- gosec clean (justified #nosec annotations, cookie/redirect hardening,
bounded multipart parsing, UUID packing without narrowing conversions);
govulncheck clean with toolchain pinned to go1.26.8
- THREAT_MODEL verification pointers, SECURITY.md testing section, README,
CHANGELOG 0.1.0, docs/RELEASE_NOTES.md, PLAN status
Phase 5 (ADR-0003). pkg/concepts fixes the epistemic vocabulary
(observation, fact, memory, claim, hypothesis, belief, prediction,
assumption, inference, opinion), memory kinds and relation names.
internal/memory stores episodic, semantic, procedural and
autobiographical memories in one mind-scoped table with trust-derived
credibility, importance, salience and decaying activation. Retrieval
fuses full-text rank (any-term by default), optional pgvector similarity,
recency, activation, importance and credibility, and returns the
component scores so every recall can be explained. Decay lowers
activation and never deletes; retraction and supersession keep rows for
provenance. Relationships are constrained to one mind at insert time.
Embeddings live in a conditional pgvector table keyed by model so vector
spaces are never mixed; without an embedder the system degrades to text
and graph retrieval.
Attention gates encoding: the attend handler turns admitted observations
into episodic memories (operator changes become autobiographical ones)
with memory_created events; the retrieve process proposes recalled
memories as candidates and admitted recalls are reinforced with
memory_retrieved events carrying their scoring components.
Memory explorer UI (search with component breakdown, timeline, filters,
operator knowledge entry), memory detail with provenance, relationships,
citing events and an inaccurate-memory correction; API; noemactl memory
commands; decay and embed-missing background jobs.
Phase 3. Events are the append-only record of everything a mind does
(ADR-0002). pkg/events defines the closed type vocabulary, categories,
evidence references and the observation payload with explicit trust
levels. The store validates and appends inside the caller's transaction,
publishes to a bounded fan-out bus only after commit, queries by seq
cursor with type/category/source/salience/confidence/time/search
filters, and walks provenance: cause, parents, children, cited evidence,
derived events and correlation groups. Durable per-consumer cursors never
move backwards.
Server-Sent Events streams (per mind and global) subscribe before
replaying history after Last-Event-ID so nothing is missed, apply the
same filter vocabulary live, and heartbeat. Operators can inject
observations tagged with operator trust for demos and tests.
UI: live thought stream with filters and paging, forensic event page
with causal chain and evidence navigation, dashboard important events.
Personality and status changes now leave operator_action events in the
mind's own history. CLI: event inspect/list/tail, observe.
- config: defaults -> JSON file -> NOEMA_* env with validation and redaction
- observability: slog with secret-redacting handler; Prometheus registry with
the metric set from the plan (events, workspace, memory, LLM, tools, queues)
- scheduler: supervised Group and bounded Pool so no goroutine is unowned
- storage: pgx pool with statement timeout, embedded migration runner
(advisory lock, checksums, up/down/status), per-test schema helper
- migrations/0001: append-only guard trigger, users, sessions, api tokens,
recovery codes, audit log, settings
- pkg/ids: UUIDv7 with monotonic counter
Andy Dixon