The shape of it
The stop is dumb and instant. The judgment sits to the side.
That single design choice is what makes the whole thing work in production. The component that halts an action can't afford to be slow or clever — so it isn't. The component that judges coherence needs room to reason — so it runs off the critical path and never becomes a bottleneck. Five roles, each doing one job.
01 Before the run
The Ledger — a declared world, not a guess
The hard part of supervising agents isn't the maths; it's knowing when two agents are talking about the same fact. Sheaf solves that by declaration: the pod's configuration names the shared facts and the relations allowed over them up front. Witnesses then extract against that closed vocabulary — a bounded problem, not open-ended guesswork. Anything outside the Ledger is invisible by design, which is what makes the guarantee precise instead of hand-wavy.
facts:
- income # numeric
- ltv # numeric
- rate # numeric
- risk_tier # ordinal: A > B > C > D
relations: [ordering, equality, implication]
consent_required: # the Gate blocks these pending a human
- submit_application_to_lender
- send_binding_quote
- pull_hard_credit_check
02 During the run · the stop
The Gate and the Warden — an unbreakable halt
Every action an agent takes routes through the Gate before it executes. The Gate is deliberately simple: it checks the action against the Ledger's consent list. If it's there, the action does not fire — full stop. No model in the loop to be slow, prompt-injected, or talked out of it; just a lookup on the critical path.
When the Gate blocks, the Warden picks up the red phone: it pauses the run and puts the decision in front of a human — approve, deny, or step in — then resumes or aborts. Nothing consequential happens without that door, and the door can't be argued with.
03 During the run · the measurement
The Witness and the Reporter — coherence, continuously
Each agent gets a Witness watching from the side. It reads what its agent is reasoning and doing, and extracts that agent's relational claims about the shared facts — risk_tier(applicant) > threshold, rate_quoted = rate_offered — never bare opinions.
The Reporter collects every Witness's testimony and continuously checks that it glues together. If two agents have quietly diverged — one acting on a fact another has already contradicted — it surfaces the exact contradiction while the run is live and rings the red phone. When the run ends, it issues the certificate below.
What you get
A coherence certificate, not a confidence score
Two genuine measurements a model can't fake about itself — the same consistency mathematics used in signal fusion and formal verification.
Every agent's claims glue into one coherent view of the world.
Each pair agrees, yet no single account holds them all — an irreducible loop.
Signed and stored per run. It's the artifact your risk team signs, your regulator accepts, and your board relies on — before you let agents act on their own. See the mathematics →
Built for your stack
Three ways to put Sheaf in front of your agents
You choose how much Sheaf does — from a read-only check to actually stopping the action. All three return the coherence certificate; two of them give you the hard stop.
"ledger": { "facts": […], "holdOnObstruction": true } },
"input": "…",
"proposedAction": { "name": "submit_recommendation", "args": {…} } }
# → returns the H⁰/H¹ certificate + the answer.
# Contradiction + proposedAction → the action is PARKED for human release.
# Also: POST /measure (advise only) · route via MCP (Gate) — same held-action machinery.
What Sheaf checks
Three checks on every answer
Sheaf checks three things: your agents' claims against the sources of truth you designate, the plausibility of the values themselves — flagging what's obviously false or impossible — and whether the whole thing holds together, as a single coherence certificate. What it catches is the failure that causes the incident: agents that look fine one by one but have silently pulled apart underneath — correct in the parts, broken in the whole.
See it run against your agents.
Book a demoOr read the proof behind the certificate — the mathematics.