AIDEN Engine

The AIDEN engine is the authoritative deterministic baseline for AIDEN’s internal engineering pre‑review gate.

It evaluates structured proposals against a pinned policy bundle sourced from aiden-policies, computes per-domain assurance scores, produces an explicit pre‑review recommendation (READY / CONDITIONAL / BLOCKED), and emits the evidence needed for reviewer packets, demo surfaces, and replay.

Human review remains explicit; assistive modes can draft/explain/surface gaps, but cannot overwrite the deterministic baseline.

Public shape

The public AIDEN story is intentionally three repos wide: aiden-engine for runtime, aiden-policies for policy source, and aiden-demo for the stakeholder surface.

Runtime posture

• Deterministic mode is authoritative
• Live assist is bounded and assistive
• Human review remains explicit
• Publication views are outputs, not scoring logic

What lives here

• deterministic policy evaluation, scoring, and gate logic
• bounded live-assist runtime with typed tools, budgets, redaction, fallback, and trace writing
• pinned policy manifest and vendored bundle metadata
• shared contracts and schemas
• publication-view generation inputs for review packs and docs

Key concepts

• Policy pack — config/policy-pack.json describes the pinned policy provenance exposed to public consumers
• Policy manifest — policy-manifest.json pins the aiden-policies source commit, pack versions, and bundle contents used by the engine
• Guard outcomes — pass, fail, abstain, degrade
• Gate outcome — APPROVE, CONDITIONAL, BLOCK
• Delta path — minimum remediation path to cross the threshold
• Publication views — FPF-aligned engineering views and other publication surfaces derived from runtime evidence

Getting started

deno task check
deno task test
deno task start

Deployment

aiden-engine now targets Deno Deploy instead of Vercel. The deploy entrypoint is the source src/index.ts, declared in deno.json, and the public demo contract is served directly from the long-lived Express app at /api/*.

The repo is now Deno-first:

• runtime commands live in deno.json
• CI and GitHub workflows invoke deno, not npm
• package.json remains only as a dependency manifest for npm package resolution under Deno

For local parity:

deno task check
deno task start

Use the Deno Deploy CLI for the stable engine URL now. GitHub-linked deploys are a follow-on, not a blocker.

Policy package

aiden-policies is the source repo. This repo vendors a pinned bundle under policies/, exposes provenance via policy_pack, and loads the active files listed in policy-manifest.json.

HTTP endpoints

Method	Path	Description
POST	/api/architect	Architect Assist endpoint
POST	/api/reviewer	Reviewer Assist endpoint
GET	/api/health	Minimal health check

Modes

• deterministic — runs the deterministic evaluator/scorer/gate pipeline
• live-assist — runs the bounded assistive step loop with typed tools, budgets, and fallback

Public evidence envelope

The API response is designed for visible bounded-runtime evidence, not black-box output.

{
  "mode": "live-assist",
  "result": { "summary": "..." },
  "trace": { "tool_calls": [], "budget_summary": {}, "safety_checks": {} },
  "budget_summary": {
    "steps_used": 3,
    "tool_calls_used": 2
  },
  "safety_status": "ok",
  "trace_id": "uuid",
  "policy_pack": {
    "version": "2026.03.12",
    "published_at": "2026-03-12T12:00:00Z",
    "source_repo": "modern-literacy/aiden-policies",
    "source_path": ".",
    "manifest_path": "policy-manifest.json",
    "source_commit": "pinned-d0c0bc75935b68e0",
    "packs": {
      "arch": {
        "path": "arch",
        "version": "1.0.0",
        "sha": "sha256:fdf5cd182672e67f233b0b18ce676bb433ad9118b8988cbaddcc04456afaefe5"
      }
    },
    "domains": {
      "data-privacy": ["hipaa/phi-handling.yaml"]
    }
  },
  "fallback_status": "live-assist-active",
  "escalation_status": "not_required",
  "escalation_reasons": []
}

Public-safe controls

• no autonomous writes
• no open-web browsing
• tool allowlist enforced
• trace redaction enforced
• deterministic fallback available
• explicit escalation when safety gates or budgets require it

Docs

• docs/assurance-model.md — scoring and gate thresholds
• docs/evaluator-spec.md — predicate evaluation spec
• docs/lifecycle.md — proposal lifecycle
• docs/tevb-views.md — publication-view generation and FPF alignment

Public reference posture

This repository is public so the runtime contract and architecture can be inspected. Do not commit secrets or confidential proposal data.