The hull — the ring every body runs

A body in Orreth never runs its graph bare. Every body — the librarian, echo, the planner, and the agent you made this morning — runs the same fixed ring, the hull, and the agent’s own graph is one stage inside it. The kernel alters the call stack without touching an agent’s nodes: the seat words, the covenant’s slice, the metered gateway, the checkpoint per hop and the stop at a safe boundary all live in the ring, so no graph can hide from them or leave them out.

flowchart LR
  subgraph HULL["THE HULL — the ring every body runs"]
      hear["hear<br/>the ask read whole,<br/>its session found"] --> recall["recall<br/>what the body remembers of you,<br/>the canon it wears, the clock, the world"]
      recall --> route{"route<br/>read off the ask's marker"}
      route -->|"a human's ask"| echat["the chat edge"]
      route -->|"a duty · an objective"| ework["the work edge"]
      route -->|"a marker it is interested in"| eevent["the event edge"]
      subgraph WORK["work — the template's graph: YOUR nodes"]
          think["think · a metered mind,<br/>a prompt and a stall"]
          imp["import · a repository's compiled LangGraph,<br/>every hop a record"]
          echo["echo · the words back, no mind"]
      end
      echat --> WORK
      ework --> WORK
      eevent --> WORK
      WORK --> reply["the reply<br/>signed by the body, whole,<br/>with its journey in plain words"]
  end
  classDef k fill:#3536a4,color:#eef2ff,stroke:#8f91ff;
  classDef body fill:#087d86,color:#efffff,stroke:#55d8d7;
  classDef yours fill:#f2a91d,color:#101625,stroke:#ffd36a,stroke-width:2px;
  class hear,recall,route,echat,ework,eevent,reply k;
  class think,imp,echo yours;

The stages

• hear — the ask is read whole and the session it belongs to is found.
• recall — the body reads what it remembers of you (your profile, labelled by who said it), the canon it wears (its template, its policy, its prompt and skill), the clock and the world.
• route — the way in is picked from the ask’s marker and said in the journey: the chat edge for a human’s ask, the work edge for a duty on the clock or an objective the intent loop filed, the event edge for a marker the body declared interest in. These three edges are the three ways an agent is addressed; the interoperability modes page takes them one by one.
• work — the template’s graph, finally read: the nodes you declared or the code you imported. A think node is one metered mind with a prompt and a stall; an echo node is the words back with no mind; an import node runs a repository’s compiled LangGraph at a commit, in a dev universe only, and every hop it takes is a record. A way out of a node may wear a when — the hull’s edge, a pattern in the ask, a pattern in the last reply — and the hull picks the way out as the run goes; a declared graph runs forward only.
• the reply — signed by the body’s own key, landed whole on the ground with its journey, and published as a fact on the feed.

Open any reply’s journey in the chat (the ⌄ on its line) and you read the ring as it ran: heard the ask · recalled N notes · routed to the chat edge · the work node runs graph mind.v0: think · thought it through the metered gateway.

What the ring keeps for you

• The seat words and the covenant’s slice are in recall, so a body answers under who it serves and what it may do, whatever its graph says.
• The meter is at work: a mind is reached only through the gateway, under the body’s own key.
• A checkpoint per hop is the body’s working memory, never truth; the reply is the truth.
• The stop at a safe boundary: a person can always stop what the machine manages, and the ring is where the stop lands.
• Every hop a record: since the Studio, the hull records a hop for every node its work stage walks, declared or imported, so the Studio’s canvas and the experiment room’s replay read the same rows.

The hull as the outer box

The Studio draws THE HULL as the outermost box around every agent’s graph — the stages as blocks, your graph inside its work stage, an import node a box inside that holding the code’s own graph — and lights the ring with the hops when a run goes. The drawing is this page’s picture, live. See the true graph.

A seed named in the canon and not built: guardrails as a layer of the hull, between recall and work, where the kernel may refuse, narrow or rewrite under rails declared on a floor — layered over whatever a LangGraph engineers inside its own code, the record telling a hop refused by the rail from one refused in the code. The stage and the record are ready for it; the rails themselves are a design of their own.