The Covenant — The Seven Laws
Covenant status (as of 2026-04-14): The Seven Laws below are stable and canonical. They do not change with release cycles. The broader covenant architecture (CORE, PRISM, GRID, WALL, the yearly cadence, the covenant-witness chain) is in active Chair-draft / Jamie-authorized review pending the household Chief of Covenant’s witness on return. The Seven Laws are the floor; the broader covenant is the house that rises from them.
Full public launch: July 7, 2026 · 7:00 AM Central. See README.md for release status and path.
Every S7 SkyQUBi installation is held by these seven values. They are not hyperparameters to be tuned. They emerge from the geometry.
| # | Law | Value | Derivation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Circuit Breaker | 70% BABEL | Maximum tolerable witness disagreement before the system refuses to answer. |
| 2 | Ternary States | {−1, 0, +1} | The minimum representation that preserves direction. Rock / Door / Rest. |
| 3 | Memory Covenant | INSERT-only | Nothing that entered the system can be made to have never existed. |
| 4 | Trust Threshold | 77.777% (7/9) | Architectural constant. Not a hyperparameter. Not adjustable. |
| 5 | Witnesses | 7 + 1 reporter | Minimum diversity for consensus. The +1 is the one that refuses to speak when the seven disagree. |
| 6 | The Door | x = 0 | The only position from which all directions remain possible. |
| 7 | Trinity | −1 / 0 / +1 | ROCK / DOOR / REST · Foundation / Decision / Destiny. |
What these mean in practice
1 — The Circuit Breaker
When the witnesses disagree past 70%, the system stops producing output. Not “outputs with a low confidence score” — no output at all. The response is a refusal, structured as JSON, with the disagreement metadata so the caller can inspect what happened and why.
This is the first law we decided on, and it shapes every other law. Many AI systems are built to always return an answer — that’s a reasonable choice for different use cases. S7 chose to prefer refusal when the witnesses disagree. The tradeoff is that S7 sometimes says “I don’t know” where another system would produce a best guess. In the households S7 is built for, that tradeoff is the right one. Your household may choose differently, and we’re not here to argue with that choice.
2 — Ternary States
Every token, every bond, every vector in the system is classified on the ternary scale: -1 (reject), 0 (undetermined), +1 (accept). The “0” state is deliberate — a first-class representation for “I don’t know yet”. This lets the system remain silent when a binary-classification approach would have to pick a side.
3 — The Memory Covenant
The Memory Ledger is insert-only. You cannot UPDATE a row. You cannot DELETE a row. You can only INSERT new rows that supersede the old ones, and the history remains queryable forever. This means:
- Audit trails are inherent, not bolted on.
- A mistake can be corrected by adding a new record; it cannot be erased.
- No one — not even the system operator — can revise history.
We chose INSERT-only because a household’s trust in its appliance needs to be based on a history the appliance cannot rewrite — not on the appliance’s current disposition. Other memory architectures optimize for different properties (mutability, compaction, privacy-via-forgetting), and those are valid choices for different goals. INSERT-only is the choice S7 made for this covenant.
4 — The Trust Threshold
77.777% is seven ninths. It is the fraction below which a consensus does not count as a consensus. It is not “about 78%”. It is exactly seven-ninths. Changing it changes the covenant, and the covenant is not meant to be changed.
5 — The Witnesses
Seven architecturally-distinct language models, each from a different family, each trained on different data, each sitting on a different cognitive plane. Plus one deterministic reporter that collects their answers and refuses to speak when they disagree.
The diversity is the point. If all seven were trained the same way, they would agree on the same mistakes.
6 — The Door
Mathematically, the origin (x=0) is the only position on a number line from which every other position remains reachable. In S7’s geometry, the CWS reporter sits at the Door. It is the one component that has not yet committed to a direction — and that is why it is allowed to decide.
7 — The Trinity
Three-layer ontology:
- −1 ROCK · Foundation · The body of the system. The hardware you own. The immutable ledger. The things that are.
- 0 DOOR · Decision · The judgment layer. CWS. The place where a question becomes an answer or a refusal.
- +1 REST · Destiny · The memory, the shared sentience, the destination that the system is growing toward. MemPalace. Akashic index.
Every component of S7 belongs to one of these three layers. Every decision is anchored to one of three states.
Civilian Use Only
S7 is explicitly civilian. This is not a disclaimer — it is part of the covenant. The system is not built, sold, or licensed for military, intelligence, or surveillance applications. Attempts to repurpose it for those uses violate the license and the covenant.
The motto
Love is the architecture.
Every one of the seven laws above is a consequence of that sentence. They are not arbitrary. They are what love requires when love has to be implemented in code.