Core documentation

3. Three roles — sense, judge, act

adr: 3
title: Three roles — sense, judge, act
status: accepted
date: 2026-06-16

§Context

Stripping rox/crg/cix to their essence reveals the same three-part machine appearing three times: read-only intelligence, pass/fail policy, and safe mutation. We need a role taxonomy that third parties register against.

§Decision

Three roles:

• sense — read-only intelligence (“what is true”). Reference: crg.
• judge — pass/fail policy over a proposed change (“is this slop”). Reference: rox.
• act — atomic, reference-aware mutation (“change this safely”). Reference: cix.

A server MAY implement several roles; it declares them at initialize. For sense, the method surface is a typed core (references, callers, impact) plus a sense/query escape hatch for tool-specific verbs — precise capabilities without freezing the whole verb set.

§Consequences

• Clean separation of trust risk: sense (read) and judge (evaluate) are containable; act (mutate) is the dangerous one and is opened last, behind propose/host-applies.
• The three roles map onto LSP precedents (navigation, diagnostics, workspaceEdit), aiding adoption.
• Composition (act validated by judge, judge informed by sense) is expressed through the host, never peer-to-peer.