Technology · Transferred research

Technology from the lab.

Two of these are products — transferred research, badged with the line of work they came from. The rest are the architectures and instruments the lab builds to investigate with. Statuses are honest everywhere; the thesis itself lives on the research page.

Transferred research

Products, in the ordinary sense — research that crossed into usable technology, badged with the line of work it came from.

Transferred research · open-source guardrails

Ārai

From · the grounding experiments →

The guardrail layer of Kete, extracted as a standalone open-source tool (Apache-2.0 / MIT). Ārai parses your instruction files into structured rules, runs as an MCP server so agents can author their own guardrails mid-session, and logs every firing locally so you can inspect what rules fired, on which tools, for which prompts — all running on your machine, no hosted service required.

  • Static (AST/regex) code extraction — no LLM cost
  • Instruction files → structured, queryable rules
  • Pre-flight guardrail enforcement via Claude Code hooks
  • MCP server — agents register their own rules mid-session
  • Local audit log of every firing (JSONL, no network egress)
  • Apache-2.0 / MIT — free for internal and commercial use

Transferred research · closed alpha, built on Ārai

Kete

From · the grounding experiments →

Deterministic enforcement and audit for AI coding agents at the organisation level. Org policy across agents, audit retention, query and export, and a pre-computed structural map of your codebase — so your AI agent follows the rules in hour twelve the same way it did in hour one, and you can prove it did. Closed alpha — not taking signups yet.

  • Structural map of every definition, call, and import chain
  • Instruction-file rules extracted as typed, queryable constraints
  • Pre-flight rule injection via hooks and MCP
  • Optional semantic layer (LLM analysis of what code means)
  • Corrections persist across sessions as high-trust facts

Architectures & instruments

Not products: the systems the lab builds to investigate with. They have pages, statuses and results — not price tags.

Research system · a planet you can reason about

Kano

Whole worlds grown from a single seed — geology, climate, hydrology, weather, life — deterministic, causal, and queryable by AI. Every place can explain why it is there; every answer an agent gets traces back to the world, never to a guess. The world layer of the thesis.

  • One seed = one planet, reproducible bit-for-bit for a given engine version — no unseeded randomness, no mutable world database
  • Causal all the way down: plates → mountains → rain shadows → deserts → the colour of a leaf
  • Walk it first-person — vegetation grown live from local soil, moisture and light
  • 30+ query verbs over MCP: any AI can interview the world directly
  • Rewindable time — “was this valley wet three months ago?” has one true answer

Research instrument · a world made of your codebase

Pono

Pono — te reo Māori for truth — applies the Kano contract to code: a deterministic, queryable world derived from a repository’s own history. Agents answer "what changed, what is current, why does this exist" from ground they can cite instead of guessing. In daily internal use grounding our own sessions; reaches teams through Kete. Its transfer is pre-registered, not claimed — the twin-session experiments hold it to account in public.

  • Deterministic projection of git history — no AI anywhere in the derivation
  • Identity through change: renames and moves never lose the thread
  • "Why does this exist?" resolves to the commit that set it
  • Rewindable — the repo at any point in its history, one true answer
  • Tested in public: pre-registered twin-session readouts, misses included

Research architecture · the mind layer

Taniwha Engine

A four-layer cognitive architecture — scene tree, world memory, per-agent belief graphs, and composable decision procedures — that gives AI agents real beliefs, memory, trust, and identity. Agents form convictions, lose trust, consolidate memory overnight, and behave like individuals rather than chat turns.

  • Per-agent belief graphs with provenance and ambivalence
  • Working memory, sleep consolidation, dream replay, and forgetting
  • Directional trust that gates testimony and instruction
  • Routine compression and surprise-preserving episodic memory
  • Every accepted belief change traces to the process that committed it

How they relate

Taniwha is one thesis expressed across three planes — a mind, a ground, and an assurance layer. They cooperate; they are not a single stack where each tool depends on the one below it.

Kano and Pono are the ground — one grows deterministic planets from a single seed; the other derives a deterministic world from a repository’s own history. An agent anchored to a world that can’t lie can practice being right — and our own working sessions stand on Pono every day.

The Taniwha Engine is the mind — per-agent belief graphs where convictions form and trust is lost over long horizons. Its first-generation research line powers Briarwatch; its current generation powers Copperhollow, and the two are labelled by generation as capabilities migrate.

Ārai is our open-source guardrail layer, shipping today: instruction-file enforcement for coding agents — no hosted service, no telemetry, Apache-2.0 / MIT licensed. If you need your rules followed, start here.

Kete is the assurance platform Ārai plugs into, in active development: deterministic enforcement and audit at the organisation level, with the structural map and Pono’s ground under your agents. Closed alpha while it matures.

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