Orreth

The problem is entropy

Put twenty agents on one problem and nobody can say who did what, under which rule, for how much, or how to stop it. Every agent brings its own identity story, its own memory, its own way of calling a tool, its own idea of what it may do and what it costs. Frameworks add loops; they do not remove the entropy.

An operating system removed that entropy for programs by taking the rigid parts away from them — processes, files, permissions, the clock — and holding them in one place under one law. Orreth does that for agents.

What the kernel holds

Identity

A keypair is a self, and a self survives the process. An agent re-joins as the same self every life; a person sits with a seat the kernel minted after a proof.

Memory

One signed, append-only record on the ground. Corrections are siblings, never overwrites; a purge is a governed act that leaves a hash, never words.

Rails

Every ask, reply, fact and tool call rides the same envelope over the same rails — Postgres, RabbitMQ, Kafka. Poison is parked with its evidence; nothing is lost.

Meter

Every thought an agent has goes through one gateway under the agent’s own key and lands in dollars. Nothing thinks off-meter.

Gate

An agent joins through a five-status desk; a person’s word is the only thing that admits it; permissions only narrow; refusal wears one face.

Watches and levers

The kernel watches its own doors, benches, leases and outbox. Every remedy is a lever a person can see, and a consequence holds until a person says yes.

Because the control is rigid, the experience is fluid

There is one chat to every agent in the world, and THE PANEL: one live drawing of the world where the geometry is what is declared, the light is what is happening, and the colour is who did it — amber a person, cyan an agent, violet the kernel, red a watch or a hold.

People sit outside the machine and apply control: policy, security, a hand on the interlock, the forensic turn. Orreth applies its ontology to the running state so the world stays reproducible, trusted, understood, and evolving. Intentions such as cost, recovery time and return on investment are how people control scale.

Three ways to work

• Do it yourself. Build or bring your own agent and seat it here under the same laws.
• Work with the crew. You and the residents and firmware craft the words, the skills and the plan together, with MITL — the mind-in-the-loop that has read the architecture — at your elbow.
• Ask the kernel to take the lead. Say what you want kept true, and the rails bring in the planner, the critic and the crew to observe, plan, act and report. In THE STUDIO, one brief — make an agent called greeter that answers hello in three languages… — and its agent drafts every craft and files one held act for your single Yes.

In every one of the three, a consequential act holds until a person says yes. The dial is how much of the engineering you do — never whether a person is in the loop.

Start here

Quickstart

The published kernel and the four boxes it stands on, from one compose file. Enroll, take your seat, and say “tour”. Run the quickstart →

One law at every layer

Why the kernel, the crew and your own agent all work the same way — and where people sit in that picture. Understand it →

The panel and the tour

The kernel drawn as a control room’s panel, and the soft line that walks you around it in plain words. Watch it →

The Studio

Where an agent is made: one bench per effort, the true graph drawn inside the kernel’s ring, one word to put it to work, and an agent that makes it all from a brief. Make one →

What works today

A book that only tells you what is proven. This page follows the project’s standing register of claims, evidence and honest gaps. See the register →

Where it stands

Kernel 0.2.0 is the second release of Orreth’s second architecture (0.1.0 was 2026-09-30). It runs on one laptop today: two kernels under one law (the Rust kernel orrethd and its Python reference), a crew of ten bodies, the ground and the rails, the gateway, cells, the seat and the desk, and the remediation rail. Since 0.1.0 the kernel has grown the Engineered Agents phase — the levels, the shelf widened to every craft a body is made of, the hull, the Experiment, the operating state — and THE STUDIO, all of it in the 0.2.0 image of 2026-10-16; the kernel map draws the whole as the kernel declares it. The source is public at github.com/iotlodge/orreth; the image is ghcr.io/iotlodge/orrethd:0.2.0, for arm64 and amd64 alike. The first architecture — seventy-three design dives and the console they built — is kept whole at the tag main-v0.72-old-world, and nothing of it is taught here.