ADR-029: Formal Intent and Tool Receipt Auditing
ADR 029: Formal Intent and Tool Receipt Auditing
Section titled “ADR 029: Formal Intent and Tool Receipt Auditing”Renumbered from ADR-024 on 2026-05-02 to resolve a duplicate-number collision with
024-dashboard-axum-spa.
Status
Section titled “Status”Proposed (2026-04-23)
Context
Section titled “Context”AI agents in the Vox ecosystem perform high-stakes operations (file edits, VCS commits, database writes). Hallucinations and autonomous loops can lead to corrupted codebases and budget exhaustion. We need a way to verify that a tool call was explicitly intended by the orchestrator and actually executed as reported.
Decision
Section titled “Decision”We implement a two-tier verification system:
- Formal Intent: Agents must claim a “receipt” for every tool call they wish to report as successful.
- Cryptographic Tool Receipts: The orchestrator issues HMAC-signed receipts for every tool execution it brokers. Agents include these receipt IDs in their task completion claims.
Consequences
Section titled “Consequences”- Agents cannot hallucinate tool outputs that were never executed.
- Socrates (hallucination defense) can explicitly check for “fabricated” claims.
- Auditing logs gain a cryptographic trail for every side-effect in the repository.