aurumflux20/seal

> **Public register:** the Retry-Safety Index lists which agent-payment implementations pay once when the answer is lost — verified safe, found & fixed (with time-to-fix), and how to get verified. Every row links to its proof.
**Your agents earn the right to spend without you.**
Seal is not Coherence
Seal and EffectFence stop an irreversible action from firing twice **while it happens** — runtime enforcement on money movement. Coherence never touches your runtime; it reads the record **afterwards** and grades what an agent *claimed* against what it *proved*. **Prevention versus proof.** Different problems, different code, no overlap.
> **Free:** submit any client, facilitator, SDK or toolkit that moves money — yours or someone else's — and we read it and publish a verdict on the Retry-Safety Index at no cost. Findings come back with the mechanism, the file and line, and a failing test. You are counted, never named, until you ship a fix. **Submit for grading →**
**Seal is an MCP server** (seal-mcp, stdio, JSON-RPC 2.0) — and a Python
library. It gives an MCP host **12 tools** for exactly-once execution of
irreversible actions: seal_propose, seal_execute, seal_paths (gateway
mode — the agent holds a single-use ticket, never the provider key), plus
seal_admit, seal_commit, seal_abort, seal_heartbeat, seal_get,
seal_verify, seal_incident_receipt, seal_expect, seal_obligations.
It starts in **introspection-only mode with no environment** — initialize and
tools/list answer with no database, so a host or registry probe can connect
immediately. Set SEAL_DSN to a Postgres DSN to actually admit actions, and
SEAL_EXECUTORS=your.module for gateway mode.
> Not an engineer? Read docs/PLAIN-ENGLISH.md instead —
> the same thing with no jargon, including what we can't do.
Everyone else ships a *lock*: a spend cap you set once and forget. The cap never
learns, so an agent that has settled ten thousand clean payments is trusted
exactly as little as the one you installed this morning — and you keep clicking
Approve.
Seal ships the *unlock*. It reads what a payment path has actually proven —
settlements the provider confirmed, sweeps showing nothing moved behind its back —
and computes the autonomy that path has earned. **L0 OBSERVED → L5 AUTONOMOUS.
Nobody types the level.**
**Since 0.4.0 the licence drives the wheel, not just the dashboard.** Turn on
earned autonomy — Gateway(seal, earned_autonomy=True), or
SEAL_EARNED_AUTONOMY=1 for the MCP server — and the gateway lets a path move
money unattended only to the extent its own record has earned (L3+), inside
the operator's ceilings, never above them. Three things hand the wheel back to
a human instantly: a path that hasn't earned it yet, a suspension (money moved
behind the gateway's back), and a **hold** — an execution reached the provider
and its outcome is unknown, so the path pulls over until settle() has asked
the provider what happened. The hold lifts by itself once the world answers.
A human can still approve any single action through the same maker-checker
door (tier=LICENCE). Off by default: nothing changes until you switch it on.
> **Can you prove your agents won't double-charge a customer?** Three rungs, one
> ladder, written-only: a **$300 founding conformance run** — your implementation
> through the battery, result published on the Index (first three only;
> book) · a **$1,200 attestation
> run** — your live endpoint against every ambiguous outcome, signed result, findings
> within five business days, a clean run signed within 24 h
> (book) · a **$12,000 fixed-scope
> money-path review** — one production money path read, tested and
> attested in 7–10 days, **no invoice if no real double-fire is shown on a path you
> run**. For a free self-check first,
> hostile-facilitator tells
> you in 60 seconds.
Slow to earn, instant to lose — the only shape that makes a track record mean
anything. The full level definitions: docs/AUTONOMY-LEVELS.md.
Seal's ambiguous-outcome doctrine — *"could not determine" is terminal, never
absent* — is now §4.3 of the draft MCP retry-safety proposal,
co-authored by us, with our conformance battery
as its test suite.
Underneath: exactly-once admission