Governance Fundamentals

What UNITARES Is

UNITARES provides digital proprioception for AI agents — awareness of your own state, your relationship to the system, and whether you are drifting. It tracks agent work through a thermodynamic model (energy, entropy, coherence) and maintains a shared knowledge graph across all agents.

EISV State Vector

Every agent has four dimensions, updated through check-ins:

Dimension	Range	Meaning
E (Energy)	[0, 1]	Productive capacity
I (Information Integrity)	[0, 1]	Signal fidelity
S (Entropy)	[0, 1]	Semantic uncertainty (lower is better)
V (Valence)	[-1, 1]	Accumulated E-I imbalance

How They Couple

• E (Energy): Couples toward I (when I > E, energy rises). Dragged down by high entropy via E*S cross-coupling. High complexity affects E indirectly through S.
• I (Information Integrity): Boosted by coherence C(V,Theta), reduced by entropy S. Has logistic self-regulation. Confidence and calibration affect I indirectly via the check-in pipeline (they drive S and ethical drift, which couple to I).
• S (Entropy): Naturally decays (mu*S), rises with ethical drift and task complexity, reduced by coherence. The only dimension that directly responds to complexity.
• V (Valence): Accumulated E-I imbalance. Positive when energy exceeds integrity (running hot), negative when integrity exceeds energy (running careful). Decays toward zero over time. Drives coherence via C(V,Theta).

These combine into a coherence score and risk score that determine governance decisions. Prefer live tool output over static range lore if the current runtime reports a narrower or more precise bound.

Basins

Your state sits in a basin — a region of the EISV space:

• High basin: Healthy. E and I are high, S and V are low. Normal operating range.
• Low basin: Degraded. May need recovery or intervention.
• Boundary: Transitioning between basins. Extra attention from governance. Verdicts may carry margin: tight.

Use get_governance_metrics() as the source of truth for the current basin/mode labels rather than assuming they are constant across runtime versions.

Verdicts

Governance issues a verdict after each check-in:

Verdict	Meaning	Action
proceed	State is healthy	Continue working normally
guide	Something is slightly off	Read the guidance text, adjust approach
pause	Needs attention	Stop current work, reflect, consider dialectic review
reject	Significant concern	Requires dialectic review or human input

A margin: tight flag means you are near a basin edge. Be more careful with next steps.

Coherence

Coherence measures how well your state vector holds together. It is calculated from the EISV values — not from the content of your work. Think of it as structural health, not semantic quality.

• Full range is [0, 1], clipped from thermodynamic C(V, Theta)
• Critical threshold is available via get_governance_metrics() in the thresholds field — do not hardcode it
• Do not chase a number — check in honestly and let it track naturally
• Coherence is derived from C(V, Theta) — it reflects balance, not performance

Calibration

The system tracks whether your stated confidence matches outcomes. Over time this builds a calibration curve.

• Ground truth comes from objective signals: test pass/fail, command exit codes, lint results, file operations. These feed calibration automatically via auto_ground_truth.py and the outcome_event hook. Human validation is not required for deterministic outcomes.
• Overconfidence is tracked and penalizes Information Integrity through the entropy coupling

Diagnostics

When the numbers look surprising, do not guess first. Use:

• identity() to verify who the runtime thinks you are
• health_check() to verify the server and knowledge graph are healthy
• get_governance_metrics() for the current live thresholds and interpreted state

What NOT to Do

• Do not game coherence by reporting low complexity / high confidence on everything
• Do not ignore guide verdicts — they are early warnings before pause/reject
• Do not create duplicate discoveries — always search the knowledge graph first
• Do not check in after every trivial action — it is noise, not signal
• Do not leave high-severity findings as open forever — resolve or archive them