# Roadmap

Covenant is moving toward an open operating layer for governed autonomous software engineering. The roadmap is organized by system capability, not by marketing milestones.

## Foundation: Local Control Plane

The foundation is a local control plane for autonomous engineering systems: daemon, CLI, TUI, IPC/HTTP gateway, identity, capabilities, audit, memory, A2A, MCP, budget, local receipts, provenance envelopes, autonomous workflow records, and live validation paths.

## Now: Harden the Local Control Plane

The current priority is making the local daemon and CLI reliable under real engineering use.

- Keep identity, peer auth, capability checks, audit rows, and token rotation strict.
- Expand live tests across daemon, CLI, HTTP, MCP, A2A, and subprocess boundaries.
- Keep A2A requeue, force-error repair, lease guards, and queue-status semantics covered through live CLI fixtures.
- Improve memory lifecycle: working-tier cleanup, compaction policy, and drift checks.
- Keep local validation and CI equivalent through `agent-os/scripts/validate.sh`.
- Keep public docs aligned with implementation evidence and validation coverage.

## Next: Resumable Autonomous Maintenance

The next layer is a repeatable agentic maintenance loop that can run in bounded cycles.

- Task lifecycle state persisted in a simple inspectable format.
- Handoff artifacts that let a fresh session resume without private chat context.
- Review gates for architecture, security, docs drift, and missing tests.
- Human escalation records for credentials, destructive operations, and production authority.
- Regression hardening from prior failures into guard scripts and tests.
- Project memory conventions for roadmap, status, architecture, and known gaps.

## Then: Stronger Execution and Policy

The runtime needs stronger isolation and clearer policy boundaries before it can host untrusted agents.

- Linux sandboxing with gVisor first; Firecracker remains a later target.
- Per-resource budgets with pause, save, and resume semantics.
- Secret access through daemon-mediated tools instead of direct environment exposure.
- Capability scopes for agent-to-agent send, receive, respond, tool calls, memory writes, and external gateways.
- Operator-visible provenance for every privileged action.

## Later: Networked Agents and Settlement

- Multi-peer operation across authenticated hosts.
- Public provenance through signed artifacts and transparency-log attestation.
- Daemon-driven on-chain settlement and provider-payout escrow, built on the deployed Solana settlement program (the program is deployed on mainnet; credit mint, burn, treasury, staking, slashing, credit metering, and receipt-batch anchoring are implemented on-chain, but the economic lifecycle is not yet production). See [BUILT.md](./BUILT.md) for the honesty boundary.
- The agent-to-service payment rail over HTTP 402 (x402) is already operating: Covenant runs a live x402 seller that settles in USDC on Solana mainnet, alongside an escrow service and an Ephemeral-Rollup credit facilitator, and the daemon can pay for metered x402 resources outbound. The remaining settlement work is the daemon-driven anchoring of internal resource receipts described above, not the payment rail itself.
- SDKs for agent authors: the TypeScript `@covenant-org/sdk` for the settlement program is published on npm; Python, Rust-crate, and framework-adapter SDKs remain planned.
- Installer and upgrade path for local machines.
- Marketplace and registry infrastructure for authenticated agent networks.

## Research Tracks

- Durable project memory that survives long time horizons without stale context poisoning.
- Verifiable autonomous engineering: signed tasks, signed reviews, and auditable repair loops.
- Policy-aware tool orchestration across MCP, local commands, browsers, and code execution.
- Continuous repair loops that can detect regressions, bisect causes, and propose fixes.
- Human-directed autonomy: humans set strategy and authority boundaries; agents execute and maintain.