Governance & approvals

Recoder governs what agents are allowed to do below the model, so it doesn't depend on trusting agent output. Instruction files shape behavior; the governance gate, policy decisions, and a tamper-evident audit trail enforce it.

The governance gate

Every risky action an agent (or the convergence flow) takes passes a policy gate before it happens: git writes, PR creation, merges, secret access, network calls. The gate returns allow (proceed), needs approval (pause for a human), or deny (stop, with a reason). The gate is fail-closed: if the policy engine is unavailable or errors, the default is to deny, never to silently allow.

Approvals

When an action needs human sign-off it surfaces as an approval. Open the Approvals view to see pending requests with their context — what's being requested, by which run, and the risk tier — and approve or reject each. A merge that policy gates waits on your approval before any git write, and the decision (and who made it) becomes part of the evidence and audit trail. You also get an OS notification when a run needs input or an approval.

The audit trail

Every governed action is sealed into a Merkle audit chain — an append-only, tamper-evident log. Each entry is content-hashed and linked to the previous one, so any after-the-fact edit is detectable. This is what lets Recoder prove not just that the agent did X, but that X was authorized by this policy, approved by this person, with a tamper-evident record.

Compliance evidence export

From a governed merge's evidence you can export a compliance pack (JSON or Markdown) mapping the evidence to a control catalog: SOC 2 (CC8.1 change management, CC7.2 change verification), EU AI Act (Art. 12 record-keeping, Art. 14 human oversight), DORA (ICT change control), and Recoder (convergence integrity). Each control's status is derived from a real evidence field — e.g. human oversight is met only when a real approval was recorded, partial for a high-risk change auto-allowed without one, and not-evidenced for a low-risk auto-merge. Recoder never fabricates a “met.”

Solo / self-hosted mode

Running fully local without a cloud database, some cloud-oriented gates would otherwise fail closed and block everything. Recoder has explicit solo-mode seams that let the local workflow work end to end while keeping the governance decisions and audit truthful. You get the gate and the audit trail locally; you don't get blocked just because there's no cloud backend.