Documentation

Noren is an open, agent-native operating layer. It runs locally on the host and exposes eight operating-layer primitives (intent, runtime, memory, identity, permissions, comms, compositor, and settlement) through which human users, software agents, and tools coordinate work, share state, and settle usage.

The documentation is organized into concepts, architecture, reference, protocols, and operations. The Getting started guide covers installation and an end-to-end intent dispatch; Concepts establishes the model referenced throughout the remainder of the documentation.

Browse by area

Getting started

Install the daemon, register an agent, and dispatch a first intent.

Concepts

Intents, agents, capabilities, memory, audit, and settlement.

Autonomous workflow

Task lifecycle, continuation, validation gates, and sprint summaries.

Validation profile

Operating surfaces, evidence requirements, and live boundary checks.

Alpha release contract

Source-alpha boundary, evidence bundle requirements, and human-owned release decisions.

Architecture

Architecture of the daemon, runtime, local control plane, and the planned Robinhood Chain settlement contracts.

Command-line interface

Reference for every noren subcommand, including arguments and exit codes.

HTTP API

Routes, request schemas, and response shapes for the local HTTP gateway.

Agent manifest

Schema, runtime contract, and validation rules for the agent.toml manifest.

Capability tokens

ed25519-signed permission tokens: structure, canonical encoding, verification, and revocation.

MCP integration

The Tool trait, native tools, and integration with external MCP servers over JSON-RPC.

Security model

Trust boundaries, threat model, defaults, and operator responsibilities.

Robinhood Chain

Settlement on Robinhood Chain (chain id 4663) in USDG: signed trust data verified with ecrecover, and the EVM contracts in the repository. Coming soon.

Provenance

Commit-scoped envelopes for autonomy tasks, changed file evidence, and validation records.

Live coverage

Opt-in real-boundary test inventory across daemon, CLI, A2A, MCP, runtime, and model surfaces.

Linux gVisor runner

Repeatable Linux host setup for the opt-in runsc sandbox validation path.

Status

Noren is pre-1.0 systems infrastructure. The local daemon, CLI, TUI, identity, permissions, memory, audit, peer auth, budget, and local receipt ledger are implemented in the repository. MCP, A2A, the local web console, autonomous workflow records, live coverage matrix, and provenance envelopes are actively hardening. Runtime isolation includes manifest-level requirements, trusted-local fail-closed behavior, daemon-selectable Linux gVisor configuration, runtime-level gVisor runner work, live Linux sandbox coverage, and a documented Linux runner setup. Noren's settlement chain is Robinhood Chain (chain id 4663, USDG, ETH for gas). Solidity contracts (escrow, bond-receipt and reputation verifiers, trade guards) exist in the repository with Foundry tests, but nothing is deployed on-chain yet; deployment is coming soon. The Noren token contract is deployed (see the token page). A separate x402 gateway and facilitator for USDG is already live at gateway.usenoren.xyz. Distributed settlement, cross-chain enforcement, installers, additional-language SDK publication (Python and Rust-crate), release-scope and audit-root signing, and transparency publication are tracked on the roadmap.

Source repository: coming soon.

Position in the stack

Noren operates between the host operating system and user-facing agentic applications. It provides identity, permissions, memory, communication, and settlement as shared, host-level services, allowing language models, agent frameworks, and end-user applications to integrate against a common substrate rather than reimplement these primitives independently.