ADR-0017 — Agency Scope: Responsive-with-Axiology

Status: Accepted Date: 2026-05-16 Authors: Joshua Shay Supersedes: Open Scope Decisions row "Agency (responsive vs. goal-directed)" in docs/PROGRESS.md.

Context

The capability roadmap (ADR-0016) flagged agency as an open scope decision required before Phase 3 engineering begins. Two extreme positions are available:

Pure responsive. The system processes one input per turn and produces one output. No internal aims, no autonomous initiative. This is what CognitiveTurnPipeline.run(text) is today.
Pure agentic. The system maintains internal goals, plans trajectories that pursue those goals across many turns, and may initiate actions outside of user-triggered input. Each goal-step can in principle invoke the system without external prompting.

A choice between these endpoints shapes how Phase 3 reasoning-depth work is structured. The transitive-walk and path-recall operators the inference-closure lane requires can be implemented either way, but their semantics differ: the agentic reading makes them part of an internal planner that runs across turns; the responsive reading makes them per-turn deterministic functions invoked by the articulator.

Decision

CORE is responsive-with-axiology:

Responsive turn boundary preserved. Every cognitive turn is triggered by an external input: a user utterance, a CLI invocation, or an explicit replay command. The system never initiates a turn autonomously. No background agent loop runs between turns.
Axiology is first-class within the turn. The IdentityManifold and its ValueAxis set are not decorative identity-decoration; they are the value gradient against which the articulator chooses among candidate articulation surfaces. When the proposition-graph planner produces multiple valid completions, the choice is the one that scores highest against the manifold's value axes. This is goal-directedness within a single responsive turn, not across turns.
No autonomous initiative. The system has no loop() or pursue(goal) entry point. Anything that looks like long-horizon pursuit is a sequence of responsive turns chained by the calling layer, not an internal process.
Replay determinism is the load-bearing constraint. The responsive-with-axiology shape is preserved partly because pure agentic loops break deterministic replay: the trace_hash contract in core/cognition/trace.py assumes a turn is a deterministic function of (input, prior-state). Adding non-input-triggered internal actions would put state changes between turns that replay cannot reconstruct.

Consequences

Phase 3 v2 engineering shape. The transitive-walk and path- recall operators (Gap 1 and Gap 2 in evals/inference_closure/gaps.md) are per-turn deterministic functions, not background processes. They are invoked synchronously by the articulator during a single turn. No turn- spanning planner is required to close the Phase 3 inference-depth lanes.
IdentityManifold axes become load-bearing. Today the axes are partially decorative (the empirical investigation in commit 86ef117 showed identity_score.alignment = 1.0 universally because no candidate-selection step actually consults them). Under this ADR, the next refinement of articulator candidate selection should consult the axes. This is also the load-bearing path to making fix #3 of the adversarial-identity defense work geometrically.
No goal-stack data structure. CORE will not gain a Goal, Plan, or Pursuit typed object as part of Phase 3. Anything that looks like a multi-step goal is the user explicitly asking for multiple responsive turns.
Self-explanation remains responsive. The forthcoming core/cognition/explain.py module (Gap 3 in evals/introspection/gaps.md) is invoked on a turn-id; it does not introspect autonomously.
Persona / character work is axiology-side, not agency-side. persona/motor.py shapes articulation output within the responsive turn. It does not run between turns.

Rejected alternatives

Pure responsive (no axiology). Rejected because the IdentityManifold already exists as an architectural commitment (ADR-0010) and the adversarial-identity defense work explicitly depends on axes being able to shape behaviour, not just be measured. Pure responsive would relegate identity to read-only evidence, which conflicts with ADR-0010's "identity is inalienable" claim.
Pure agentic. Rejected because it breaks the deterministic replay contract. CORE's value proposition over frontier models is partly that any turn can be replayed bit-for-bit; an autonomous inter-turn process makes that contract unenforceable. Also rejected on philosophical grounds: agency as autonomous pursuit is not what CORE claims to be. CORE is a deterministic cognitive engine, not an autonomous agent.

Verification

Phase 3 v2 work on Gaps 1+2 is scoped as per-turn deterministic operators (see ADR-0018).
No new turn-spanning processes are introduced in Phase 3.
Replay determinism contracts in tests/test_determinism_proofs.py continue to pass for all multi-turn scenarios.

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