Govern

Govern is the evidence view for company accounts: where you watch the decisions on one action in a domain land on real traffic, the decisions it made, the receipts it produced, and the posture it’s in. It’s the evidence that lets you keep an agent on a consequential action and still answer “what happened, and why?”, the on-screen view of the same records a proof pack exports.

What this does

For one governed action over a time window, Govern shows, summary-first:

  • Identity: the action, entity type, environment, and current mode.
  • Posture: whether the control is in observe or enforce, and when that last changed.
  • Decisions by outcome: counts of allowed, blocked, approval_required, invalid, with a drill-down into individual decisions.
  • Receipts: the signed records, with their signature and verifiability status.
  • Completeness: whether the window shown is complete or truncated, so a partial view never reads as the whole story.

It reads top-down: a one-line summary of the control’s state, then detail on demand.

Observe vs enforce

A domain runs in one of two postures, and Govern is honest about which:

  • observe (advisory-only), KIFF evaluates every action and records what it would have decided, but does not withhold anything; your runtime proceeds as usual. This is the on-ramp: watch real decisions on real traffic before you turn the gate on.
  • enforce: KIFF’s decision is acted on: allowed runs, everything else is withheld by your runtime.

Observe always reads as would-have-decided, never as production enforcement. The point of observe is to build trust before you flip to enforce, and the moment you flipped is itself recorded.

Posture is per domain: each domain carries its own, so one can be enforcing while another is still in observe. You flip it from the domain’s home page. Changing enforcement is a management action: a runtime key can propose and be governed, but it cannot flip the posture of the domain it runs under.

A personal account doesn’t show Govern: its Cards, Needs you and Activity cover the same decisions for each agent.

Honest by design

Govern is built to state what it can and cannot show. Every section renders a distinct recorded, empty, or not-yet-recorded state rather than implying completeness:

  • An action with no traffic yet shows an honest empty state, not a staged success.
  • A section whose data isn’t recorded yet says so plainly.
  • Verifiability is scope-aware, a sampled result never presents itself as a complete-window guarantee.

This matters because most dashboards imply more than they know. Govern’s value depends on the opposite: if it says something happened, it happened, and if it can’t show something, it says so.

What it does not show

  • It does not show that an action executed downstream, only what KIFF decided. KIFF is the decision, not the runner.
  • It does not present demo or synthetic data as real customer evidence.
  • It does not claim reviewer attribution the product doesn’t record yet (see What’s real today).

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