Cognition-OS/docs/010-design-goals.md

Design goals

Primary goals

1. Deterministic governance

   • enforce policy outside model weights
   • deterministic decisions for authority, budgeting, and audit

2. Capability-based execution

   • no ambient permissions for models or tools
   • explicit, revocable capabilities with TTL and scope

3. Cognitive resources as first-class

   • context budgets, compute budgets, risk budgets
   • cost-aware scheduling (latency vs confidence)

4. Provenance

   • structured event model for “what happened and why”
   • support tamper-evident logging (later)

5. Isolation domains

   • strong sandboxing for tools and untrusted workers
   • fault containment and graceful degradation

Non-goals (for v0.x)

• kernel-resident LLM inference
• universal scheduler for all workloads
• solving “alignment” in the model