AI covenant

Overview

The covenant applies to the three repositories of the project: knowledge-trust-ladder, obsidian-ktl-registrar and obsidian-ktl-curator.

The core principle is ownership: everything submitted is the contributor’s, whatever tools helped create it, and they must be able to understand, verify, and defend it. AI review comments are suggestions, not requirements.

Discussions are for human judgement - AI systems must not be used to autonomously post comments, replies, or messages. Disclosure is required when proposing changes to code the contributor does not fully understand, and AI co-authorship trailers in commit messages are actively discouraged. Adapted from the LinkML AI Covenant.

A dedicated Repository-Owned Agent Automation section covers the case this repository actually runs into: an agent (ktl-librarian, scheduled or interactive) proposing changes with nobody drafting alongside it. It commits as a labeled bot identity or the invoking maintainer - never both, and never with an AI co-authorship trailer either way; every such change lands as a PR requiring human approval, never a direct push or an agent’s own approval; the scheduled agent runs in a read-only job with no git credentials on disk and hands its change to a separate privileged job that runs no agent code, which checks the “edit only .lokf/knowledge/” contract after the run rather than merely requesting it; and a skill recording a person’s verdict (ktl-curator’s verified: human:<id>) may write only what that person said about that specific item, in that session, never inferred, batched, or self-supplied.