Independent Research · Est. 2025


CIRWEL Systems

— A research preface, with running code

Runtime governance
for heterogeneous
AI-agent fleets.

Researchers study agents at two moments — before deployment, and after an incident. In between, while agents are actually running, the behavior that matters most happens where you can't see it: the slow drift, the approach to failure. Traces are abundant, but nothing reads an agent's own state while it acts. UNITARES makes that window measurable — a continuous, class-calibrated reading of each agent's state, with signed provenance behind every intervention.

The principle is one word — nothing inferred. State is measured, identity is proven, memory is sourced, every action carries a recorded reason. Never reconstructed after the fact.


— The receipts

Paper
UNITARES: Information-Theoretic Governance of Heterogeneous Agent Fleets · Wang, 2026 · CC-BY 4.0
DOI
10.5281/zenodo.19647159 (concept · resolves to latest)
Author
Kenny Wang · Independent Researcher · ORCID 0009-0006-7544-2374
Production
In continuous operation since November 2025 · governing CIRWEL's own development fleet
For
fleet operators · AI-safety teams · underwriters of agent-driven systems
Code
github.com/cirwel/unitares · server, Apache 2.0
github.com/cirwel/unitares-governance-plugin · Claude Code / Codex client, Apache 2.0
github.com/cirwel/unitares-paper-v6 · paper source (LaTeX)
huggingface.co/hikewa · datasets & distilled models

— Production snapshot

Data plate
Governance events
4.3M+
Last 7 days
46196
Active agents (7d)
11
KG discoveries
1352

Live figures from our production fleet, in continuous operation since November 2025. Refreshed 2026-07-26; same meter as the public repository's frozen production snapshot.


— List of plates

  1. Pl. I The measurement gap
  2. Pl. II Heterogeneous agent classes
  3. Pl. III The verdict cycle
  4. Pl. IV The knowledge graph
  5. Pl. V Identity & lineage

§01 — The thesis

Runtime self-state is the missing layer.

Operating a heterogeneous agent fleet in continuous production surfaces a class of failure that pre-deployment evaluation and post-incident forensics don't catch: the slow, silent drift of agent state across hours and days of normal running. The traces show what the agent did, abundantly. They don't show what state it was in while doing it — because nothing on the agent or alongside it is producing that reading.

Logs are what an agent did.
Self-state is what it was while doing it.

CIRWEL's response is a runtime layer that gives each agent a continuous reading of its own state — a four-dimensional vector summarizing capacity, signal integrity, uncertainty, and the imbalance among them, updated from every check-in. The reading is calibrated against agents of the same class (a coding session, a research conversation, a resident cron, an embedded service, an ephemeral parser), because a long-running coding assistant does not behave like an ephemeral parser, and neither behaves like an embedded service. Drift is then detected against the right reference, not an averaged one.

The framework is described in a paper and has been governing CIRWEL's own development fleet without interruption since November 2025.

— A measurement on our own fleet

On replay, per-class and fleet-wide baselines disagree on 29% of verdicts.

On a 30-day slice of our own production data — 13,310 governance observations across the fleet — replaying each decision with per-class baselines instead of one fleet-wide baseline produces a different verdict 28.9% of the time. The disagreement skews systematically: state vectors the fleet-wide baseline classifies as healthy or borderline are usually flagged as drifting under per-class baselines. Per-class flip rates range 15–33%.

This is measured on our own production data. The gap is large enough to show that averaging dissimilar agents into one distribution is not a benign default; class-conditional calibration is the response. (§11.6 of the paper.)

§02 — Three pillars

i

Class-conditional calibration

A coding agent and a research agent are not held to the same statistics. UNITARES learns separate baselines per agent class from production telemetry, so drift in one class is not masked by noise from another — caught while it is happening, early enough to intervene, late enough to be evidence-based.

→ § how the layers fit together

ii

Shared memory — the knowledge graph

One provenance-tracked graph the whole fleet reads and writes — discoveries, decisions, and dialectic resolutions, queryable by the operator and by the agent mid-task. Nothing the fleet learns lives in one head; nothing it acts on is unsourced. Postgres with the Apache AGE graph extension and pgvector retrieval, fused by reciprocal-rank ranking.

→ § the shared substrate

iii

Verifiable identity & provenance

Identity is process-bound, not a claimable label: fresh agents mint fresh identity, lineage is declared rather than inherited, and every intervention carries a signed chain back to the observation that triggered it. Who did what is provable, not asserted — replayable by a regulator, an underwriter, or the next-shift human.

→ § identity & lineage

§03 — In production

Governing its own development.

The system you read about on this page also wrote, tested, and shipped a meaningful fraction of itself. CIRWEL's development fleet — a heterogeneous mix of long-running resident agents, short-lived coding sessions, an embedded edge service, and a Discord bridge — has been governed continuously by UNITARES since November 2025.

Each check-in resolves to a binary action — proceed or pause — qualified by a sub-action (approve or guide under proceed; reject and other reasons under pause), together with a signed lineage back to the observation that triggered it.

Living under one's own framework is the lowest-cost credibility a research operator can offer. We treat it as the floor, not the ceiling.

This page is part of the loop. The colophon below shows the exact commit and build time that produced what you are reading.

§04 — Engage

Four ways in.

  • Read The paper: UNITARES (Wang, 2026), citable via the DOI above.
  • Run

    The server at CIRWEL/unitares boots locally. The plugin at CIRWEL/unitares-governance-plugin drops into Claude Code or Codex and emits real verdicts against it.

    $ gh repo clone CIRWEL/unitares && cd unitares && docker compose up → http://localhost:8767/mcp/
  • Build on

    The open artifacts: a 32,181-trajectory EISV dataset, distilled teacher and student models, and a verdict-counterfactual reproducibility kit at huggingface.co/hikewa. The calibration, drift, and provenance primitives are Apache-2 — meant to be built on, not reimplemented.

  • Write Direct to the founder: [email protected]. Funders, researchers, and integrators all welcome.