Introduction to Obsidian

Here is the thing about multi-agent systems that nobody wants to talk about: they are, at their core, a governance problem. Not a technology problem. Not an infrastructure problem. A governance problem.

You can build the most elegant message-passing substrate in the world — and people have, repeatedly, with varying degrees of architectural hubris — but if your agents cannot agree on what constitutes acceptable behavior, you have built a very expensive argument generator.

What Obsidian Actually Is

Obsidian is a multi-agent orchestration system written in Rust. That sentence is technically accurate and almost completely uninformative, like describing the Roman Senate as “a building where people talked.”

More precisely: Obsidian is a system where autonomous agents coordinate through constitutional consensus — a set of shared principles that every agent agrees to uphold, not because they are forced to, but because the principles are correct.

The Warden oversees the system. It does not micromanage. It does not dictate strategy. It watches, it intervenes when constitutional boundaries are violated, and it maintains the kind of watchful equilibrium that good governance requires.

Why Rust

Because when your agents are making decisions that compound recursively through a fractal delegation tree, you want the substrate to be correct. Not eventually consistent. Not probably fine. Correct.

Rust’s type system catches at compile time the kinds of errors that, in other languages, manifest at 3 AM as cascading agent failures that look disturbingly like a coordinated revolt.

What This Documentation Covers

Architecture: How the pieces fit together, and why they fit that way
The Constitution: The twelve principles that govern agent behavior
Core Concepts: Wardens, agents, consensus, and the fractal patterns that emerge from their interaction
Guides: Practical instructions for building with Obsidian

Start with the Architecture overview, or dive into The Constitution if you prefer your documentation with philosophical underpinnings.