Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
133 lines (104 loc) · 10.5 KB

File metadata and controls

133 lines (104 loc) · 10.5 KB

CAS — Governed Autonomy for Software Delivery

Speed without governance creates risk. Governance without speed creates irrelevance. CAS (Coding-Autopilot-System) is built on the position that this is a false trade-off: when governance is executable — schemas, gates, and evidence instead of meeting minutes — it is the speed.

This page is the organization-facing version of the flagship vision document. It exists so anyone landing on github.com/Coding-Autopilot-System can read the thesis and reach every repository behind it without cloning anything first.

The problem

Every enterprise is discovering the same thing: AI agents can produce code far faster than humans can review it. The standard responses both fail —

  • Ship it (speed without governance): untracked artifacts, untruthful commit messages, unreviewed merges, silent drift. We have measured versions of each of these failure classes in our own workspace — including a commit that claimed to add test suites while its diff contained none.
  • Board it (governance without speed): review queues, manual sign-off, documentation that decays the day it's written. The agents idle; the advantage evaporates.

CAS is a working system — 13 repositories in this organization plus a workstation control plane — that resolves the tension by making every governance control machine-executable and evidence-producing.

The answer: governed autonomy

flowchart LR
    subgraph Control["Control plane - gsd-orchestrator (.NET 10)"]
        G[Goal admission<br/>typed, bounded, budgeted] --> S[Dependency-aware<br/>scheduling]
    end
    subgraph Execution["Execution plane - autogen / Microsoft Agent Framework (Python 3.12)"]
        S --> W1[Worker fan-out<br/>isolated mutation scope]
        W1 --> T[Typed failure states<br/>structured JSON telemetry]
    end
    subgraph Governance["Governance plane"]
        P[Promptimprover<br/>prompt & learning governance] -.gates.-> W1
        C[cas-contracts<br/>versioned JSON schemas] -.validates.-> T
        E[cas-evals<br/>deterministic verification] --> V{Evidence<br/>gate}
    end
    T --> E
    V -->|proven| M[Merge via PR<br/>branch-protected, two-party]
    V -->|failed| R[Bounded repair<br/>or deterministic halt]
    R --> S
Loading

Three planes, strictly separated, each owned by a repository in this organization:

Plane Owner What it enforces
Control gsd-orchestrator Goals are typed, measurable, bounded. Nothing runs without a budget and a stop rule.
Execution autogen (MAF workers) Every worker owns its mutation scope exclusively. Failures are typed states, never stack-trace soup.
Governance Promptimprover, cas-contracts, cas-evals Prompts, schemas, and verification are versioned artifacts. Completion requires deterministic evidence — an agent saying "done" is not evidence.

Every change runs the same SDLC loop

flowchart TD
    A[Plan<br/>phase contract with threat model] --> B[Execute<br/>agent fan-out, one owner per repo]
    B --> C[Test<br/>ratcheted branch-coverage gates]
    C --> D[Verify<br/>goal-backward evidence check]
    D --> E[Review<br/>PR, branch protection, two-party approval]
    E --> F[Audit<br/>milestone verification vs falsifiable requirements]
    F -->|drift found| A
    C -.->|coverage regression| B
    D -.->|gaps| B
Loading

The loop is not aspirational — each gate is a running control with a falsifiable check:

  • Truthful history: a commit-integrity check flags any test:-typed commit whose diff contains no test files (built after catching a real one).
  • Ratcheted coverage: CI gates fail on branch-coverage regression and only ratchet upward with real tests — never a hardcoded aspirational 100%.
  • Typed failures: a versioned FailureState schema in cas-contracts; orchestrator and workers map every boundary failure to it, proven by fault injection (process kills, corrupted checkpoints, simulated API outages).
  • Supply-chain pinning: every third-party GitHub Action pinned to a commit SHA with least-privilege token scopes, verified by an org-wide lint that runs in CI.
  • Drift detection: a daily workspace-health sweep runs 11 checks (unpushed work, orphaned artifacts, stale PRs, encoding hazards, broken worktrees) and exits non-zero on any finding.
  • Deploy lock as policy: infrastructure is maintained "bicep-ready" — linted, parameterized, pinned — while an operator hard lock prevents any cloud deployment until it is deliberately lifted. Governance includes what you don't ship.

Modular agents, priced to the task

flowchart TD
    O[Orchestrator<br/>frontier model, full context] --> PL[Planner agents<br/>mid-tier]
    O --> EX[Executor agents<br/>mid-tier, one repo each]
    O --> VR[Verifier / critic agents<br/>mid-tier]
    O --> DOC[Doc & housekeeping agents<br/>small models]
    PL -->|plans as contracts| EX
    EX -->|evidence| VR
    style O fill:#1f6feb,color:#fff
Loading

The orchestrator delegates through typed sub-agents (planner, executor, verifier, critic, doc-writer), each with a scoped toolset and an explicitly chosen model tier — frontier reasoning only where it pays, small models for mechanical work. Specialist agents deliberately cannot spawn their own sub-agents; delegation depth is a governance decision, not an accident. The result: parallel throughput of a team, token cost of a task queue, and an audit trail for every decision.

Proof points (v1.4 hardening milestone, one working week)

  • 25-PR release train merged across 13 repos with branch protection never left disabled.
  • 2 orphaned test suites recovered and gated; coverage baselines measured and ratcheted (branch coverage, not vanity line metrics).
  • 37 + 16 new tests landed via fault injection and coverage phases; 134-test suites green.
  • 4 stranded commits, 11 unmerged agent branches, and 14 broken worktrees detected and recovered — zero work lost.
  • Every finding became a permanent automated check the same week it was found.

Explore the 13 repositories

Every plane above is backed by a real, buildable repository in this organization. Start wherever matches your interest:

Repository Role Plane / category
gsd-orchestrator Autonomous issue-to-PR engine; goal admission and scheduling Control
autogen Multi-agent worker fan-out on Microsoft Agent Framework Execution
Promptimprover MCP-first prompt governance and traceability Governance
cas-contracts Versioned lifecycle schemas (prompts, events, artifacts, FailureState) Governance
cas-evals Deterministic evaluation and evidence-gate verification Governance
cas-reference-product End-to-end reference workload with a verified case study Proof
cas-platform Azure hosting/observability foundation — bicep-ready, deploy-locked Platform
cloud-security-service-model Enterprise cloud security operating model Platform
cas-workstation Windows-first AI-native developer workstation bootstrap Workstation
autopilot-core Control plane for org-level CI repair automation CI Automation
ci-autopilot Worker/runtime for queued repair execution on self-hosted runners CI Automation
autopilot-demo Bounded demo target for the full failure-to-fix loop CI Automation
.github (this repo) Org governance, community health files, and this profile Org

For a shorter front-door version of this page, see the organization profile README.


This page is adapted from the canonical docs/VISION.md, maintained at the root of the CAS workstation workspace — the source of truth for this thesis, tone, and diagram style. See each repository's own docs/wiki/ for implementation-level detail. Diagrams are Mermaid-first; codex:generate-image placeholders mark where generated visuals will replace them.