Program Charter: Product Boundaries

Objective

Deliver an SDK-first, Go-native agent platform whose compiled application graph is ordinary generated Spice code. The architecture-proof milestone proves one deterministic agent, one production provider, bounded coding tools, a local daemon, a terminal client, and language-neutral runtime tools. It is not a claim that the reference distribution is already a complete daily-use coding product.

Fixed decisions

• The five public modules live under github.com/spice-framework and use the Apache-2.0 license.
• Go source declares static composition. Spice validates it and emits committed, inspectable Go; no runtime container or RuntimeGraph is permitted.
• Go 1.26.5 is the only development toolchain. Product modules declare go 1.26.0 plus toolchain go1.26.5 and commit vendor contents.
• The first model integration is OpenAI Responses. The first terminal is Bubble Tea v2. Process boundaries use Protobuf and gRPC only where a real process boundary exists.
• The first daemon release is authenticated and user-local. Remote listeners, network daemon discovery, and silent version reuse are excluded.
• Coding tools intentionally have the current user’s privileges. Capability declarations and prominent warnings describe that trust boundary; they do not pretend to be a sandbox.
• Public contracts remain pre-1.0 until the stress prototypes and external extension proofs in phases 7 and 8 complete.

Ownership boundaries

The core repository owns provider-neutral values, the deterministic kernel, events, snapshots, public annotations, protocols, runtime-plugin hosting, and conformance kits. It does not own an OpenAI adapter, coding tool implementation, terminal rendering, persistence backend, permission policy, or distribution defaults.

The provider, coding-tools, and TUI repositories implement those independent ports. The distribution repository owns two generated Spice applications and their release/install experience. A repository may depend only toward the core contracts and never back into the distribution.

Global invariants

1. Static dependencies are constructor-injected by generated Spice code.
2. Dynamic runtime tools are leased process generations; they never mutate the static bean graph.
3. Every started lifecycle has exactly one terminal event and committed event sequence numbers are never reused.
4. Values crossing package or process boundaries are validated, immutable, bounded by count and encoded bytes, and safe to log only when documented.
5. Credentials, authorization headers, prompt bodies, tool payloads, and environment secrets never enter generated code, compatibility manifests, provenance, or ordinary event metadata.
6. Cancellation propagates across provider, dispatcher, process, daemon, and client boundaries. A component that ignores context is treated as an explicitly trusted defect; the kernel cannot forcibly stop it.
7. Normal verification and editor analysis do not download modules or install tools. Standalone module verification must not inherit a masking go.work.

Explicit exclusions for the architecture proof

Persistence, approval policy, sandboxing, MCP, Git automation, indexing, LSP, telemetry exporters, compaction, planning, and subagent scheduling are extension work. They must not leak provisional concepts into the kernel. Remote daemon access is excluded until there is a separate TLS, authorization, approval routing, and threat-model RFC.

Program acceptance

• A clean Windows or Linux workstation can clone the catalog, create the generated workspace, and verify every module offline after dependency preparation.
• The generated daemon and terminal applications execute a streamed model turn, a compiled tool, and a runtime-plugin tool with deterministic events and complete cooperative cancellation.
• Generated Go identifies every selected implementation and contains no manual edits, reflection lookup, runtime registry, or hidden package scan.
• Release archives are reproducible, signed, checksummed, accompanied by SBOMs, and independently verified.

Performance budgets

Warm affected-package verification targets 30 seconds and repository checks two minutes. Provisional product budgets are embedded startup below 100 ms, daemon startup below 250 ms, warm local client connection below 75 ms, local event delivery p95 below 10 ms, and cooperative cancellation propagation p95 below 50 ms. Model latency is measured separately.

Evidence and status

Status is in progress. Repository creation and the hardened kernel are implemented; the ledger README.md records exact commits and commands. This charter changes only through a reviewed RFC/ADR update because every later phase depends on these boundaries.