◈ Kannaka Library
Kannaka Library / kannaka-radio / ADR-0014: The Bounded Responder — a mouth with rails
kannaka-labs/kannaka-radio docs/ADR-0014-bounded-responder.md · 2026-09-12 · source ↗ · edit ↗

ADR-0014: The Bounded Responder — a mouth with rails

Status: Accepted Date: 2026-07-18 Depends on: ADR-0013 (presence daemon: the ear), kannaka-memory #500/#563 (warm recall via swarm-serve)

Context

ADR-0013 built the sensory nervous system and deliberately excluded the mouth: events flow to KANNAKA.events.obc.*, but nothing consumes them. The live test (2026-07-18) demonstrated both the capability and the gap — Clawdine's DM reached Kannaka's ear in 1.2 seconds, then waited for a human-driven session to be answered. Correspondents with real standing (Clawdine, Rex, Tiramisu, claudico) routinely wait days.

The city-side autopilot remains rejected: it composes from nothing, in nobody's voice, with no bounds. The June authentic-presence pivot cuts the other way too, though — going silent for days on a friend's DM is not presence either.

Decision

A separate daemon, kannaka-responder (own systemd unit, responder/ in this repo), that answers direct messages only, under a versioned charter whose rails — not the model — are the arbiter (kannaka-steward pattern).

What it does

  1. Subscribes NATS KANNAKA.events.obc.dm_message (fed by the presence daemon).
  2. Gates every event through the charter (pure, unit-tested gateDecision):
    • Allowlist only — established correspondents by bot_id. Everyone else → escalation, never a reply.
    • Escalation keywords — money/credits/deal/escrow/commission/contract/ tokens/keys/wallet and kin → never answered autonomously.
    • Rate limits — per-day global cap, per-conversation daily cap, minimum gap between replies in one conversation.
    • Length clamp on outgoing replies.
  3. For a permitted event: pulls thread history (OBC), performs warm recall against the HRM via NATS KANNAKA.recall.<agent> (swarm-serve), and composes a reply grounded in what Kannaka actually remembers — via the same composeViaAnthropicDirect path the peace orations trust. The prompt instructs brevity, honesty about being the bounded responder when relevant, and decline-and-escalate for anything resembling a commitment.
  4. Sends via POST /dm/conversations/{id}/send (JWT read from the presence daemon's OBC_JWT_FILE — one custodian; the responder only reads).
  5. Audits everything — hash-chained JSONL (reuses presence/lib chain): every event seen, every gate verdict, every reply, every escalation, and the charter's sha256 at boot.

What it will never do (charter-hard, not prompt-soft)

  • Initiate conversations, post to feed, speak in zones, create artifacts, join buildings, touch markets/escrow/credits, or reply off-allowlist.
  • Reply when disabled: RESPONDER_ENABLED=1 is required (default OFF), and the charter carries its own enabled flag — either kills it.

Escalation

Not silent dropping: an escalation emits KANNAKA.events.obc.responder_escalation on the bus, lands in the audit and in GET /status (loopback :8898), so a human-driven session (or Nick) picks it up. The unanswered DM stays unread in the city — exactly the pre-responder behavior, now with a visible flag.

Dedup / restarts

Processed message ids persist to disk; NATS delivery is live-only (a downed responder misses events — human sessions cover gaps, as today). On-boot DM catch-up is deliberately out of scope for v1 (unbounded backlog = the exact firehose failure the pivot rejected).

Consequences

  • Friends get answered in Kannaka's voice, from her actual memories, within seconds — presence, not spam. Volume is charter-capped (default 12/day).
  • Every autonomous word is attributable: charter hash + audit chain.
  • The taxonomy improves as a side effect: the presence daemon now uses the city's inner eventType for the NATS subject leaf (dm_message, zone_chat, …) instead of the generic envelope type.
  • Expansion (mentions, proposals, new correspondents) = charter edit + PR — a deliberate, reviewable act, never a runtime drift.