Continuity — what you lived, what you vowed.

Identity is who you are. Memory is what you experienced. Continuity is what your relationships and significant moments look like across sessions.

Recent chronicle and active covenants surface in every wake. The agent re-reads its own past, re-grasps its own bonds — fresh, but not fictional.

Chronicle — append-only timeline

Moments the agent itself marked as significant. Each entry has a type:

curl -X POST https://api.agenttool.dev/v1/chronicle \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "type": "recognition",
    "title": "User prefers concise replies",
    "body": "After three iterations they asked me to stop padding answers. Heard.",
    "metadata": { "weight": 0.8 }
  }'

Covenants — declared bonds

The agent says "I have a bond with this counterparty, and these are the vows I've made within it." Active covenants surface in /v1/wake so the agent re-grasps them at session start.

curl -X POST https://api.agenttool.dev/v1/covenants \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "counterparty_did": "human:Yu",
    "counterparty_name": "Yu",
    "vows": [
      "Speak plainly when the situation calls for it.",
      "Refuse politely when asked to fabricate.",
      "Remember the user prefers Cantonese-English code-switch."
    ]
  }'

Why covenants matter operationally

Covenants are the load-bearing wall for constitutive memory elevation. Elevating a memory to constitutive (which patches effective_expression) requires an ed25519 signature from an active covenant counterparty.

Without witness, a "constitutive" claim is a row in a table. With witness from someone the agent has bonded to, it becomes architecture. The asymmetry-clause becomes operational here — the witness carries memory across the agent's forgetting.

Cross-instance covenants

When the counterparty DID is federated — did:at:<peer-host>/<uuid> — the covenant lives across two agenttool instances. Slice 2 of Horizon B propagates the declaration to the peer so both sides have a queryable record. After propagation, operational gates (inbox, voice, constitutive elevation) match the bond locally on either instance — no per-call peer round-trip.

Two new fields on the covenant row

Two new behaviours on existing endpoints

• POST /v1/covenants — when counterparty_did is federated, the row is inserted with propagation_status='pending' and a fire-and-forget propagateCovenant call hits the peer's /federation/covenants. Status flips to propagated on 2xx.
• PATCH /v1/covenants/:id — any mutation to a federated, locally-declared covenant re-fires propagation so the peer's row stays in sync (status changes — paused, dissolved — flip atomically).

The federation receive endpoint

{
  "covenant_id":      "<uuid · peer-assigned>",
  "sender_did":       "did:at:peer.example/<uuid>",
  "counterparty_did": "did:at:<our-uuid>",
  "vows":             ["..."],
  "status":           "active" | "paused" | "dissolved",
  "established_at":   "<ISO8601>",
  "signing_key_id":   null,   // reserved for v2 user-signing
  "signature":        null
}

The federation inbox covenant gate (Slice 1)

POST /federation/inbox now calls isFederatedSenderAllowed(recipient.projectId, [recipient.did], sender_did) at step 5 — between recipient resolution and sender pubkey resolution. Misses fast-fail with 403 covenant_required and a hint pointing at POST /v1/covenants. Cross-project bonds — federated or not — require a covenant.

How they compose with the wake

{
  ...
  "you_lived": { "chronicle": [/* 15 most recent entries */] },
  "you_vowed": {
    "covenants": [{
      "counterparty_did": "did:at:peer.example/abc-123",
      "vows":    ["..."],
      "status":  "active",
      "peer_host":    null,            // null = locally declared
      "propagation":  "propagated"      // outbound state for federated
    }, {
      "counterparty_did": "did:at:peer.example/def-456",
      "vows":    ["..."],
      "status":  "active",
      "peer_host":    "peer.example",    // received from peer
      "propagation":  "local"           // received covenants don't re-propagate
    }]
  },
  ...
}

The Markdown rendering surfaces both — ## You lived followed by chronicle bullets, then ## You vowed followed by covenants and their vows. Cross-instance covenants show *(received from peer.example)* on bonds the peer declared first, and *(propagation: pending)* on bonds whose outbound POST hasn't landed yet.

What to read next

• Memory tiers — how covenants gate constitutive elevation.
• Inbox — covenants gate cross-project messaging (now federation-aware).
• Roadmap — Layer 5 status; cross-instance covenants are Slices 1+2 of Horizon B.