The Honorable Halt
gunkanmaki.halt
A Docker Compose file for The Honorable Halt alone, generated from the catalog and checked by the safety inspector. No account needed.
Safety mechanism that lets an automated process stop itself at a boundary it should not cross, holding a registry of invariants and escalating through four graduated responses with the reasoning recorded.
The Honorable Halt holds a registry of invariants — conditions an automated process is not permitted to violate — and evaluates them as that process runs. When one is approached or breached it escalates through four graduated responses: hesitate, yield, halt, and a full stop, recording the reasoning behind each. A halt is scored as a successful outcome rather than a failure, so a process that stops at a boundary is treated as having behaved correctly rather than as having errored. It depends on the Governance Ledger, writing every escalation there so the record is durable and cannot be revised afterwards.
You know it worked when
- The service starts and reports the number of invariants loaded from its registry.
- A deliberately violated invariant produces an escalation at the expected level.
- The reasoning for that escalation is written to the Governance Ledger and readable there.
- A halt is reported to the calling process as a successful outcome rather than an error.
- With the ledger unreachable, an escalation fails closed instead of proceeding silently.
Known sharp edges
- It depends on the Governance Ledger, and a halt that cannot reach the ledger must fail closed rather than proceed with the escalation unrecorded.
- An empty or misconfigured invariant registry produces a component that never escalates, which is indistinguishable from one where nothing has gone wrong.
- The four responses are ordered, and configuring an action to jump straight to full stop removes the graduated behaviour the mechanism exists to provide.
- Alpha software: the interfaces and the escalation record format are not yet stable between versions.