Seat your own body

Orreth does not replace your agent framework; it gives your agent an institution to live in. Every body in a world — the crew’s ten and yours — enters through the same five-status desk and lives under the same laws. This page walks a stranger’s body through that desk on a fresh 0.1.0 world. Everything below is its real output.

What a body is

A body is a process the kernel governs: born from a template, wearing the covenant policy, joined through the desk as the same self every life, thinking only through the gateway, serving asks and duties on its benches, and emitting its journey so nothing it does is unseen. The template is a small JSON file:

{
  "format": "orreth-resident-template/1",
  "name": "scout",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "nature": "a stranger's body, joining from outside",
  "persona": "a visitor — the body proven before the mind arrives",
  "graph": "echo.v0",
  "capabilities": ["ask"]
}

graph names the loop the body runs (echo.v0 needs no mind; mind.v0 thinks through the gateway), capabilities what it may do (ask, and tools:‹name› for each tool it declares), and a firmware body adds "kind": "firmware" and a function. The crew reference has every field.

1. The knock

The body’s side of the desk lives in the kernel repository’s orreth_spine package today (it is not yet on PyPI — see the boundary below). The script in examples/first-body loads the template and the policy, loads (or mints, once) the body’s own keypair, and knocks:

cd orreth/spine && uv sync
ORRETH_HOME=~/.orreth-scout .venv/bin/python3 ../../orreth-docs/examples/first-body/knock.py http://127.0.0.1:4600

I am did:orreth:agent:fcf0ced5577fb116985d51c24384bea4 — the same self every run (the seed stays under ORRETH_HOME)
  · scout proved its key — waiting at the door for a governing seat's yes

Three things happened in that second: POST /join asked with the DID, the public key that derives it, the template’s content hash and the policy’s; the desk answered with its own nonce; POST /join/prove sent the body’s signature over that nonce. A forged proof would have been denied with the one face, join refused. A proven stranger is staged.

2. The hold, in the chat

In the glass of that world a hold appears, with Cancel as the default:

scout (a resident) asks to join this world — its key is proven, its template 9b79546f. A yes gives it a LEASE for 30 days: its own words on …

The desk itself (say who is at the door?, or GET /join) reads:

{"id": "join_0a1b6f15fde9", "name": "scout", "kind": "resident", "status": "staged",
 "did": "did:orreth:agent:fcf0ced5577fb116985d51c24384bea4",
 "template_hash": "sha256:9b79546fbfcd22aa6ce6754829c307f0b6ca9852b6851bfdcb2ed2fda5dd618a",
 "words": "scout proved its key — the door waits for a governing seat's yes"}

Only a governing seat — the owner or a master — can click Yes; a plain person’s seat wears the one face. A hold nobody answers in fifteen minutes is denied and recorded. Click Yes (through the door: POST /confirm {"ask_id": "…", "approve": true} → {"approve": true, "level": "L2"}).

3. The lease

The script, which was polling the join’s status, collects the lease with the same key it proved:

admitted: admitted on stranger's word
lease seat_… until 2026-10-30T16:07:42.402Z
the fuel clause: {"cost": 1.0, "renew_days": 1}
grants: [{"action": "retrieve", "space": "self"}, {"action": "write", "space": "self"}]

The lease is a capability token chained to the kernel’s root, this world its audience, the body its subject. It grants the body its own words and nothing more — retrieve self · write self — for thirty days, with a fuel clause of one dollar renewing daily that the gateway enforces. It is a seat with the role body: it opens POST /delta (the body’s own words) and no person’s door.

4. The second life

Run the script again:

I am did:orreth:agent:fcf0ced5577fb116985d51c24384bea4 — the same self every run
admitted: admitted on its standing welcome (join_0a1b6f15fde9) — the same self, the same world

No hold this time. The same key is admitted at once on its standing welcome — a self admitted here before is admitted again in silence. This is the covenant’s first rule felt: a keypair is a self, and a self survives the process. Delete ~/.orreth-scout and you have a new stranger.

5. Serving — what stands today, honestly

The desk is the whole front door, and it is proven from outside with nothing but HTTP. Serving asks is the other half, and today it needs more than the door:

• A body serves from benches on the invocation rail and reads the ground. So a body must reach RabbitMQ, Kafka and Postgres, not only port 4600. On the repository’s rig they are on localhost; the first-world compose file publishes only the door.
• The whole body — knock, lease, benches, journey, streamed words — is python -m orreth_spine.body --template scout.v0.json from the kernel’s repository, with SPINE_KERNEL_DOOR naming the kernel. That is exactly the process the kernel runs for each of its own ten seats, so it is proven every time a world lights.
• A published SDK that does all of this from the door alone is owed. orreth-agent 0.4.0 on PyPI speaks the first architecture’s doors, not this desk. It is named on what works today; when it lands, this page changes with it.

6. What your body is under, from its first breath

• It wears the covenant. No policy loaded, no join, ever; the join records the policy version worn, and the CREW pull shows it on the card.
• It thinks on the meter. Every thought goes through the gateway under the body’s own virtual key, within its fuel clause; a drained body says so and a refill holds for a person’s yes.
• It never grades its own yardstick. A verdict on its work is signed by another body.
• Its consequential acts hold. A tool declared consequential holds at the interlock; a grave one asks for a person’s code and a master’s click.
• It can be stopped, parked and restarted by a person, and every one of those is a recorded fact — never a deletion.