Keiyaku

Keiyaku is not designed for you, but for your frontier model.

Current world: frontier models are formidable — and expensive. Cheap models work fine, but they drift, and they always report success. And human attention is the scarcest of the three.

So Keiyaku gives each of the three the right job.

The frontier gets an exoskeleton, not a cage. It breaks goals apart, authors explicit contracts, commands a fleet in parallel. Its limited context goes to decision-grade signal — the state of every contract, never individual workers. A worker can drift, stall, or lie; a contract cannot.

The workers get contracts, not trust. Terms in bytes before the first edit; every delivery judged mechanically against the diff. Whatever drifted or lied never reaches the board.

You step back. Delegate when possible — by default, everything goes to the frontier; the verbs are its to type. Steer when necessary — the top was never handed over. The wheel stays yours.

What a contract looks like

# Ship typed Task query

## Context
Task reads scan documents ad hoc.

## Objective
One typed query surface over the whole board.

## Design
A single evaluator over persisted facts.

## Region

src/task/** tests/task-*.test.ts

## Criteria
### Query is typed
The CLI parses a predicate; the evaluator never sees a raw shell string.

### Reads stay Task-owned
Query reads only Task facts. No Contract. No Akuma.

## Verification
```bash
npm test

## What a deal looks like

```bash
keiyaku bind - < keiyaku.md     # terms written; an isolated worktree appears
keiyaku call worker -           # a worker goes in
keiyaku deliver                 # tendered; Verification runs; gates judge
keiyaku review --satisfied      # attested; main moves with a commit receipt

What the journal records

One real deal, pulled from this repo's own journal:

$ keiyaku audit kei/add-acp-provider-and-grok-build-profile

accepted audit kei/add-acp-provider-and-grok-build-profile head=0508f7eb9cb738bcab06060b13ff1a96d36e3754
report {"reworks":1,"reviews":2,"timeline":[
  {"kind":"bind","at":"2026-08-14T08:18:36.224Z"},
  {"kind":"deliver","at":"2026-08-14T13:02:08.339Z"},
  {"kind":"attestation","gate":"reviewed","verdict":"unsatisfied","summary":
   "Implementation review found no blocking code issues; authenticated official
    Grok smoke remains unavailable because this host has no grok binary."},
  {"kind":"attestation","gate":"verified","verdict":"satisfied","summary":"[1 bash exit 0] …"}]}

The review said no — with a reason, in bytes, on the journal. The deal did not land until the gates had current evidence.

The board

keiyaku status is the one screen. A slice of this repository, right now:

kanshi ─ 7 keiyaku · 18 akuma · 286 task ─ /Users/astrosheep/Developer/keiyaku-v4 main 9cfdca6017633e51827b9b2eba3c76a7fe08e05f

keiyaku 7
⧗ kei/add-acp-provider-and-grok-build-profile tendered
  worktree · integration c5cafef6 · -> refs/heads/main
  ! reviewed
⧗ kei/align-task-cli-truth-promises waiting
  ? reviewed
  held by task/align-task-cli-truth-promises-for-ready-compose

akuma 18
● aku/expert-akuma/a7aafc9e running
  alias @process-custody-lead
  keiyaku kei/make-process-custody-capability-honest (active)
○ aku/design-akuma/cc53ef08 asleep
  alias @timeline-design
? aku/grok/95d90b7d stranded
  alias @acp-provider-impl

task 8 · 5 ready · 2 held
● task/align-task-cli-truth-promises-for-ready-compose in_progress
  Align Task CLI truth promises for ready compose and world absence
  P0 · keiyaku kei/align-task-cli-truth-promises (active)

Marks accelerate scanning; the words carry the state.

The worker

---
provider: claude-agent-sdk
model: claude-sonnet-4-5
access: write
description: Repository implementation agent
---
Make scoped changes and run relevant tests.

One Markdown file, one worker. keiyaku call worker summons it.

Install

npm install -g @astrosheep/keiyaku

Node ≥ 22.19. Product law lives in docs/.

Source builds

Building from source also builds the Windows launcher with Zig 0.14.1 or later. Install that system tool separately and make zig available on PATH, or set KEIYAKU_ZIG to the selected executable. npm ci alone is not sufficient for the Windows launcher: use npm ci --ignore-scripts --prefer-offline followed by npm run build (or npm test). On non-Windows hosts, a missing or unusable Zig skips only the Windows launcher so the rest of npm run build and npm test can continue; Windows builds fail with an actionable diagnostic.