Kalki architecture: kernel, genome and admission gate

Kalki separates proposing a change from admitting it. The agent may edit its genome. Only the gate, which sits outside the agent’s read and write sets, can admit a new genome version, and the kernel loads a version only when an admission record names its hash.

Layers

surfaces     terminal UI · headless CLI · JSONL protocol
kernel       event log · policy · checkpoints · context compiler · provider gateway
executors    native Rust loop · Pi over RPC
genome       prompts, skills, context policy: what self-improvement may change
gate         eight checks a change must pass before it is kept

Layer	Built today
Kernel: event log, blob store, policy, provider gateway	Yes
Kernel: checkpoints, context compiler	Designed
Executors: native Rust loop	Yes
Genome and gate	Designed
Sandbox	Designed

The kernel

Every event is written to an append-only log framed with CRC32C checksums, with rotation and crash recovery.
Large tool output is stored by hash in a blob store and kept out of the model’s context.
A deny-first policy engine checks each bash command against named rules; the first match wins.

The admission gate

The gate admits a candidate genome only when eight ordered predicates hold. In outline, from the Agent Kalki paper:

Candidate and incumbent are compared with k live runs per case, from matched starting states.
Any loss on a protected set of cases that pass today, beyond a Bonferroni-corrected flake margin, rejects the candidate.
Gains must exceed a measured noise ceiling τ.
Token cost must stay within a bound κ.
Held-out tasks guard against overfitting to the cases behind the change.

The paper also specifies a write barrier with five invariants and maps the threat model to MITRE ATT&CK, MITRE ATLAS and the OWASP Top 10 for LLM applications.

Repository layout

Path	Contents
`crates/kalki-protocol`	Event and wire types
`crates/kalki-core`	The kernel: log, blobs, policy, providers, session loop, tools
`crates/kalki`	The `kalki` binary
`xtask`	`cargo xtask ci`, the local gate
`docs/`	Architecture, proposal, whitepaper, compatibility and ADRs
`.agents/skills/`	Skills for coding agents that work on this repository

Viveka: why “keep it if it scores higher” admits no-op changes half the time.
The Harness Is the Lab: held-out self-improvement curves for AI scientists.
Evaluation principles: the rules the gate encodes.

Contributing

Run cargo xtask ci, sign off commits with git commit -s, and open an ADR before changing the protocol, the log format, the policy engine or the gate.

Layers

The kernel

The admission gate

Repository layout

Related research

Contributing