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Guide: run the operate layer on your own runtime

ASDD mandates no runtime. If you do not want to run Goose, you implement the operate agents on whatever you already run (your own harness, another agent platform) as long as it satisfies the contract. This guide is the contract and the checklist.

The contract​

agents/runtime.md is the normative runtime contract. An operator conforms when:

  1. It runs the governance and support agents (reviewer, tester, documentation, interaction), each defined in agents/. The developer is bring-your-own: a contributor connects their own coding agent to build a change; the deployment never runs a standing developer.
  2. Each agent runs as a named, attributable agent identity (STANDARD §2.1), with disclosure on every action (§1) and least-privilege scope (§5).
  3. The reviewer model is resolved from the roster (.asdd.yml models.reviewer, falling back to ASDD_MODEL), so the model check-models validates and the model the gate actually runs cannot diverge (agents/runtime.md rule 7).
  4. The tester's model differs from the developer's (developer != tester). This is the one hard cross-runtime rule; a model cannot meaningfully test its own code.

Wire the gates​

The deterministic gates are runtime-independent. Call them directly, or expose them to your agents over MCP. Both use the same tested scripts as the single source of truth:

asdd spec-check spec.json              # definition-of-ready gate
asdd claim-check claims.json ...       # claim-protocol decision
asdd merge-eligibility PATHS ...       # the conforming-loader merge floor
asdd check-models --strict             # fails if developer == tester
asdd mcp                               # serve all gates over MCP (stdio, JSON-RPC 2.0)

Any MCP client, not only Goose, can consume asdd mcp. That is how an agent on your runtime consults the gates without shelling out.

Enforce the invariants in your CI​

Whatever runtime you run, the govern layer (adopt-govern) is the same, and these must hold: the intake gate runs on every PR, the analysis job stays contents: read, publish actions go through the policy decision point, and check-models --strict runs once your fleet's models are set. A runtime choice never relaxes a MUST in STANDARD.md.

Next: the runtime contract, conformance