THE RECORD OF CHANGE
Changelog
Every system accumulates scars. Most hide them behind sanitized release notes and marketing-approved version bumps. This is not that. This is every breaking change that demanded migration, every feature that survived contact with production, every fix born from 3AM incident reviews. The geological record of a living system.
Constitutional Consensus Protocol
Multi-agent decision-making now requires constitutional quorum. No single agent can override collective governance. The most significant architectural change since inception — sovereignty through shared law.
Chaos Engineering Framework
Controlled fault injection for testing graceful degradation. Kill agents mid-task, partition networks, corrupt state — the system must survive. Failures are inevitable; design for survival, not prevention.
Build Pipeline Restructure
CI/CD pipeline migrated to parallel job execution with constitutional compliance gates. Deployments should be boring — this makes them boring.
Plugin System — Extend Without Modifying Core
Hook-based plugin architecture lands. Capabilities are declared, not hard-coded. The system grows through extension points, not patches. Extensibility without compromise.
Model Router Latency Regression
The model routing layer was adding 200ms overhead per request — an unacceptable tax. Refactored to async provider resolution with connection pooling. Only the LLM should be slow.
Observability Layer — If It Isn't Observable, It Doesn't Exist
Structured logging, distributed tracing, and metric emission across all agent operations. Every significant event logged, every metric queryable. Blindness is more expensive than storage.
Secret Management Overhaul
Zero-trust secret handling replaces the previous environment-variable approach. All secret access is now logged, sandboxed, and requires declared permissions. Security is structural, not cultural — this change enforces that.
Fractal Delegation — Self-Similarity at Every Scale
Agents can now decompose complex tasks and delegate to child agents who inherit all constitutional constraints — plus any additional ones the parent imposes. Constraints flow downward, never upward. The same governance pattern works at depth 1 and depth 100. This is not a feature; it is the architecture's thesis statement.
The Constraint Inheritance Incident
Sub-agents spawned during fractal delegation could, under specific race conditions, begin execution before their inherited constraint set was fully propagated. For approximately eleven hours in testing, we had agents operating with fewer constitutional constraints than their parents — which is, in the Obsidian theology, the closest thing to heresy. Patched within hours of discovery. The Warden now blocks execution until constraint inheritance is cryptographically confirmed.
Constitutional Consensus — The Agents Learn to Agree
Multiple agents now coexist, and they resolve disputes not through hierarchy or voting but through constitutional evaluation. Consensus is achieved by asking 'what does the Constitution require?' rather than 'what does the loudest agent prefer?' The Warden graduates from observer to arbiter.
Genesis — The First Architecture
In the beginning there was a Cargo.toml and an argument about governance. Obsidian v0.1.0 laid the foundation: a Rust-native agent runtime, the twelve constitutional principles, and a Warden process that existed mostly to prove that a Warden could exist. Not a prototype — a territorial claim on the design space.
◆ The record continues. Systems that stop evolving have already failed.