This is an orientation to the protocol. The canonical, versioned reference lives in the repository under docs/protocol/v0/ — read it there for the authoritative definitions.
Reasoning becomes accountable.
ClisTa is not where reasoning happens. ClisTa is where reasoning becomes accountable.
A normal decision system records approved / rejected. ClisTa records the
shape that made the decision accountable: the evidence carried in, the assumptions that
shaped it, the objections that survived approval, minority reports, authority trails,
provenance, bounded scope, and verification state.
The operating law is one line: Conversation is input. Reasoning state is output. Anyone holding the append-only event log can reconstruct the decision shape deterministically — no privileged server, no trusted memory.
Events in, accountable state out.
State is never written directly. It is projected from an append-only log and then verified. The pipeline is fixed:
conversation → event log → projection → verification → accountable state
Append-only event log
The log is the single source of truth — verifiable history, not just readable data. A clean-room replay re-ingests the session and must produce a record byte-identical to the committed log. Determinism is the floor.
Projection
The reasoning state is reconstructed from events alone — decision, answer, scope, evidence, claims, surviving objections, governance reviews, minority reports. Re-run it anywhere and you get the same state.
Verification
Every capability is a command that fails closed. Green never means endorsement. Each
verifier keeps trusted: false until something outside the protocol grants
trust.
The primitives the protocol governs.
Set in letterspaced caps in prose; carried as fields and IDs in mono.
- Claim
- An assertion entered into the decision, attributable to a participant and event-time authority.
- Objection
- A challenge to a claim. It can survive an approval — recorded, not resolved away.
- Severity
- The weight a verifier or reviewer assigns to an objection or risk.
- Evidence
- An item carried into the decision, bound to a source whose lineage is auditable.
- Authority
- The boundary that routes governance reviews without turning them into approval.
- Provenance
- The source lineage and transformation of each contribution. Provenance is not truth ranking.
- Minority report
- A dissent preserved alongside the decision, never overwritten by it.
- Verification
- The fail-closed check that a boundary holds. Success is not trust; trust is granted outside the protocol.
Eighteen layers, each verifying one boundary.
Each capability is a command that proves a single thing and fails closed. Six are shown; the spine has eighteen.
integrity verifycontinuity verifyexecution verifyoutcome verifyprovenance tracerelease verify+ 12 more layers
Defined by what it is not.
- Provenance is not truth ranking. Learning is not reputation. Review is not approval.
- Continuity is not transcript replay — a successor resumes settled state, it does not re-read the conversation.
- Export is not trust or approval. Release is not attestation.
- A documented
resumeStatus: "degraded"is a boundary reached, not a broken install. - The product today is the protocol spine only — a zero-dependency CLI plus the distributable Debate Pack. UI, agent orchestration, and platforms are out of scope until the spine earns them.
Clone and replay.
The fastest way to understand the protocol is to reproduce the bundled scenario in a clean room.
Then explore the command surface on cli.clista.ai, or climb the on-ramps on learn.clista.ai.