CHARTER — the ten principles fak is built to satisfy

This is fak’s constitution: the small set of commitments every surface is meant to advance. It is the why above the what — read README.md for what fak is, AGENTS.md for how to work in the repo, and CLAIMS.md for what is actually shipped. This page names what all of that is for.

The charter is a north star, not a new gate. It does not block a commit. Instead it binds to the machinery the repo already runs: each principle points at a surface that embodies it and a deterministic scorecard that keeps it honest, and where no measuring stick exists yet, the charter says so in plain not yet language rather than claiming alignment it can’t witness. The repo already folds 18 scorecards into one debt number through tools/scorecard_control_pane.py; most of this charter is already measured there. The job of this document is to make the goal explicit, map it to that machinery, and grade the gap honestly.

The charter

1. Agentic built by default.
2. Industry leading value.
3. Low ego, flexible, Buddhist, works with anyone.
4. DOS verified.
5. Self improving, growth mindset.
6. Up to date — zero-day or pre-release support for popular concepts, papers, and models.
7. Great by default — all optimizations and concepts “just work” out of the box.
8. Agentic first. Built by agents, for agents.
9. Win-win-win — e.g. a security win that also improves performance.
10. Coherent and remaining human-steerable, good for humanity.

How the charter stays honest

A charter that only inspires is decoration. This one is wired to evidence:

• Each principle has a surface and a stick. The surface is the code or doc that makes the principle real; the stick is the scorecard whose debt number falls when the principle is better served. The score family lives in tools/*_scorecard.py, is folded by the control pane, and is re-derived from the git tree on every run — so the number can’t be gamed by editing prose.
• The grades below were grounded, not asserted. Each row’s alignment was mapped against the actual tree by an agent and then adversarially verified by a second agent told to refuse an unwitnessed claim and default to lowering the grade. That pass corrected two first drafts — it knocked “agentic-first” from A to B (the agent-readiness stick measures whether an agent can build on fak, not whether agents are the primary builders) and split “industry value” into an honesty grade and a realized-value grade. Four rows could not finish the second agent pass before a session limit; they are marked verify pending and graded conservatively.
• not yet, not failure. A principle with no dedicated measuring stick is capped below A and named as a gap to build, not scored as if the absence were success. This is the same incomplete-state discipline AGENTS.md and CLAIMS.md already enforce.

Alignment scorecard (2026-06-26)

Grades are current alignment, A (structurally embodied and measured and witnessed) through F. The control-pane key is the debt metric that already tracks the principle, or — none yet where the stick is missing.

#	Principle	Embodied by	Control-pane stick	Grade	Worst-first next action
1	Agentic by default	AGENTS.md, .mcp.json, docs/integrations/, examples/mcp/	agent (friction_debt 0)	A	Add a real-world adoption witness; the affordances are perfect, usage in the wild is unmeasured.
2	Industry leading value	docs/industry-scorecard/, BENCHMARK-AUTHORITY.md	parity (parity_debt 0)	B+	Convert the 67 honest-gap rows to measured or out-of-scope; refresh the ~47 stale SOTA bars.
3	Low ego, works with anyone	docs/integrations/interoperability.md, compatibility matrix (44 harnesses)	— none yet	B	Build an interop stick: extract + run each integration recipe’s fenced command in CI.
4	DOS verified	dos.toml [reasons.*], the (fak <leaf>) trailer, dos_verify / dos_commit_audit	ship_integrity KPI (inside code)	B	Promote dos-verified to a portfolio-level stick (stamp-adoption rate, closure-audit pass rate).
5	Self improving	tools/scorecard_control_pane.py (folds 18), /score-2x, internal/rsiloop, guard-rsi	guard_rsi (1) + the whole fold	A−	Close the remaining guard-RSI debt; promote the plan-mode RSI loops to journal-closing loops.
6	Up to date	tools/idea_scout.py (daily arXiv+GitHub), docs/notes/RESEARCH-*-triage-*	— none yet (verify pending)	B	Build a currency stick: idea-scout cadence, triage latency, model-adoption lag.
7	Great by default	cmd/fak/serve.go defaults, fak token-defaults-scorecard	token-defaults (debt 0, 4/6 savers on) (verify pending)	A−	Witness the elide-result bounded-loss saver on real traffic, then default it on (4/6 → 5/6).
8	Agentic first	AGENTS.md, tools/new_leaf.py, docs/dispatch-loop.md, this charter (agent-authored)	agent measures usability, not primacy	B	Add an agent-primacy witness (agent-authored commit / issue / PR share); usability is already A.
9	Win-win-win	the unified kernel.Syscall() seam (one decision, many budgets), compounding-benefits-of-a-saved-call	conflation (live drift +2) (verify pending)	B	Re-label the 2 unlabeled OBSERVED metric help strings; re-pin conflation to 0.
10	Human-steerable	tools/steerability_scorecard.py, tools/stability_scorecard.py, POLICY.md, docs/ROLLBACK.md	steer (live drift +2), stability (0) (verify pending)	B	Split the 2 dispatch god-files along their verb seams (/modularize); steer 2 → 0.

Row notes (the honesty behind the grades)

• #1 Agentic by default — A. Verified: agent_readiness_scorecard.py scores 100/100, grade A, friction_debt = 0 across 23 KPIs, with a live witness (experiments/agent-live/claude-code-fak-guard-live-pilot-2026-06-25.json) of Claude Code running through fak guard with a dangerous call denied and useful work continued in the same session. The only gap is adoption in the wild, which is not the same thing as readiness for adoption.
• #2 Industry value — B+ (honesty A, realized value B+). The industry scorecard itself grades A (parity_debt = 0, 100% of 89 dimensions positioned) — fak is honest and complete about where it stands. But only 5 of ~90 rows are measured leads (e.g. 4.1× fleet serving vs a tuned warm-cache stack) and 67 are explicit no-claim gaps. The principle’s literal claim — value at or above SOTA — is proven narrowly, so the realized grade is B+ even though the measuring discipline is A.
• #3 / #4 / #6 — B, capped by a missing stick. These three principles are structurally strong and witnessed in working artifacts, but none has a dedicated deterministic scorecard folded into the control pane, so each is capped below A by rule. Building those three sticks (interop, dos-verified, currency) is the single highest-leverage charter move — it turns three B’s into measurable B’s that can then be driven to A. New sticks ship as a fak subcommand in Go (the control pane already runs guard-rsi and dogfood that way), never a new tools/*.py — the pythongate ratchet reds the trunk on a new Python tool.
• #5 Self improving — A−. This is the engine that runs every other row: the control pane folds 18 scorecards into one ratcheted number (tools/scorecard_baseline.json, pinned total_debt = 366 @ ba46040), /score-2x drives debt down while a surface is dirty and hardens the metric when it saturates, and internal/rsiloop keeps-or-reverts on a witnessed signal. The − is guard_rsi_debt = 1 plus the honest note that some guard-RSI loops are still plan-mode scaffolds, not journal-closing loops. (Grounded directly; the agent pass for this row hit the session limit.)
• #8 Agentic first — B (corrected from A). The adversarial pass earned its keep here: agent-readiness being A proves the repo is built for agents, but “built by agents” as a measured fact is unwitnessed — there is no agent-contribution or feature-ownership metric, and git authorship is human (with Co-Authored-By). The practice is real (this charter was drafted by an agent workflow); the measurement of primacy is the gap.

Portfolio anchor

The committed ratchet (tools/scorecard_baseline.json @ ba46040) pins total_debt = 366. The charter-aligned sticks are mostly already at the floor: parity 0 · agent 0 · stability 0 · steer 0 · conflation 0 · demo 0 · robustness 0 · readme 0. The heaviest debt sits in slop 261 (the long tail of “great by default”), then seo 49 · appeal 19 · hygiene 15 · product 10 · code 8 · persona 2 · doc 1 · guard_rsi 1. At HEAD the control pane’s early-warning lens flags two charter-relevant regressions vs the pinned floor — steerability +2 (a dispatch god-file) and conflation +2 (two unlabeled metric help strings) — which are the two cheapest worst-first wins on the board.

Actioning the charter

Worst-first, by leverage rather than by principle number:

1. Give three principles a measuring stick (low-ego, dos-verified, up-to-date). Each is a B only because nothing measures it. Ship fak interop-score, fak dos-verified-score, and fak currency-score as Go subcommands, fold each into tools/scorecard_control_pane.py via the existing cmd: entry pattern, and re-pin. This is the move that makes the charter self-policing.
2. Retire the two live early-warnings — the cheapest real wins on the board. Re-label the two OBSERVED metric help strings (conflation +2 → 0) and split the two dispatch god-files along their verb seams (steer +2 → 0, via /modularize), then --pin the control pane back down.
3. Close the realized-value gaps. Convert industry’s 67 no-claim rows into measured head-to-heads or explicit out-of-scope declarations, and add the agent-primacy witness that would let “agentic first” earn its A honestly.
4. Drain the tail. slop 261 is the single largest debt and the biggest drag on “great by default”; run /slop-score worst-first.

Every item above is already a named scorecard or skill. The charter does not invent new process — it orders the process that exists around a single set of goals.

Governance

• Amending the charter. The ten principles change only by an explicit edit to this file with a DCO sign-off — never silently. Treat a change here the way you would a change to the frozen ABI: deliberate, reviewed, and rare.
• Keeping it honest. The scorecards keep the charter honest; /score-2x keeps the scorecards honest (debt down while a surface is dirty, the bar up when it saturates, so a frozen A is never mistaken for a finished job).
• Companions. AGENTS.md is the agent’s working contract, CLAIMS.md is the per-capability claim ledger, STATUS.md is the critical path, and INDEX.md is the full map. This charter is the layer above all of them: the goals they exist to serve.