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Torve — how the engine works

Torve runs a standing team of coding agents against a specification corpus: design documents with graded decision rows are the input, sandboxed task execution under a gate battery is the machine, and landed commits are the only output that counts.

This site is documentation for whoever operates or extends the engine. It explains shape and reasons — what the parts are, why they are separated the way they are, and which failures each separation exists to prevent.

What this site never does

It never restates a decision. Every graded decision lives in the corpus under .torve/specs/ (retired documents under .torve/archive/), with an id, a grade and the paths it governs; this site links to them and stops there. A third copy of a decision is a third thing that can disagree with the other two, and the engine has spent a lot of its life removing exactly that.

If you are new, Get started takes an empty repository through the whole loop: a gate manifest, a document, a minted task, a sandboxed run and a landing. If you are here to run the engine rather than to understand it, Operating the engine is the page you want: the verbs, which carrier answers a report, and why a single un-triaged escalation stops new work. Stability says what 0.x promises and what is internal.

Reading order

  1. System overview — the layers, the actors, and who talks to whom. Five minutes.
  2. The record — the event log that is the system of record: its vocabulary, who may write what, and what is projected from it.
  3. The execution model — a task's life from mint to landing, and what each step writes down.
  4. The live channel — what the engine can see while a run is in progress, and what it deliberately cannot.
  5. State and truth — which carrier holds what, and which ones are projections of another.
  6. What does not distribute — the assumptions that are still single-node, and what each would cost.

Two older pages are kept as records of decisions: the external review that produced S-0044, and the tracker-outbox argument it settled. They are dated and marked; they are not documentation of what the engine does now.

Running the site

just docs             # live at http://localhost:8000
just docs-diagrams    # re-render the D2 sources to SVG

Diagrams are D2 sources under pages/diagrams/.