Pipeline

The Seven-Stage Pipeline

OpenKedge routes mutation through a fixed governance pipeline:

1. Intent Proposal
   The agent declares the outcome it wants without executing the underlying mutation.

2. Context Expansion
   The system gathers relevant state, history, dependencies, authority signals, and conflict surfaces.

3. Policy Evaluation
   Governance logic determines whether the mutation is allowed, denied, or escalated.

4. Execution Contract
   Approval becomes a bounded artifact that constrains what may actually happen.

5. Task-Oriented Identity
   Execution receives a scoped identity derived for the contract rather than ambient access.

6. Execution
   The mutation is performed only within the approved bounds.

7. Evidence Chain (IEEC)
   The final state transition is linked back to the intent, context, decision, and proof.

Why this architecture matters

The pipeline creates a hard separation between probabilistic reasoning and deterministic mutation. Agents may still be wrong, incomplete, or conflicting. OpenKedge does not try to remove that uncertainty. It tries to contain it.

That containment is what makes the system trustworthy. The protocol does not assume callers are correct. It assumes the governance layer must decide whether their proposed mutations are safe enough to earn execution.

Design consequence

The most important property of the pipeline is not that it approves some actions. It is that it rejects or narrows actions before they become infrastructure side effects.