quorum — the quorum-sensing action gate
Strictly speaking
quorumis not a module (it has no Detect/Plan/Apply lifecycle and nothing toenable/disable): it is gate policy, a peer of the approve loop and the budget watcher, wired into the exec gate insideabysslinkd. This page exists as the module-style entry point; the full design lives in Agent Safety → The quorum action gate.
What it does
When the exec gate is enforcing (gate.enforcing: true), the quorum decides per action:
| Outcome | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ALLOW | Unanimous confident ALLOW from all four verifiers, no rule matched — the exec proceeds, audit-only. |
| ESCALATE | Anything less than unanimous confident ALLOW — the exec is routed to the existing phone/TTY approve loop at the demanded tier. |
| DENY | A stage-0 deny-floor hit, a canary tripwire, or a single-verifier veto — refused outright; a valid approval token does not bypass it. |
Four deterministic verifiers vote, each over a distinct input signal: V1 syntactic (raw argv), V2 policy (parsed intent + protected paths/branches), V3 behavior (temporal history), V4 reversibility (filesystem/VCS world state). Verifier failure of any kind escalates — never allows. No LLM, no network call.
With the gate in shadow mode (the default), the quorum still evaluates every exec asynchronously and audits the full vote vector — a day-one calibration corpus that never blocks anything.
Configuration
The quorum: stanza is tighten-only: add-only lists, lower-only spend threshold, raise-only tier overrides. Loosening below the shipped defaults is a config load error, and no key exists to remove or disable the compiled deny-floor.
Tooling
abysslink quorum eval -- <cmd> [args…]— read-only shadow evaluation printing the dissent-first vote vector; never executes.abysslink doctor—sec-quorum-enabled,sec-quorum-floor,sec-quorum-selftest,sec-quorum-tripwireverify the gate is armed, the floor is intact, the verifiers fail closed, and the tripwires fire.--profile at-riskescalatessec-quorum-enabledto FATAL.