Creatura · plates I to V · 2026-10-29

The anatomy of a creatura

Creatura is an agent framework for building agents out of regulation patterns taken from how living things and minds keep themselves on course. The core is one generic agent: a loop, a control layer between the model and its tools, and a contract for worlds that can lie. Everything else plugs in. A design is a regulator that fills the loop's slots, a behaviour is an extension that hooks into its verbs, and a world is where both are trained and tested.

Five plates: the creature itself with each part named, what the parts are and which of them talk, what happens in one tick, how creaturas on different vessels share their work, and how Creatura works with the agent tools around it. Names in monospace are the types in the code.

Plate I

The creature, part by part

THE BENCH · WORLDS · ORACLE · BATTERIES 1234567891011
  1. 1
    The head
    The seat: where each choice is made: a model, a trained network or a planner answers one visible tool, or none.
    IPolicy · ModelPolicy · NetworkSeat · SeatView
  2. 2
    The mane
    The regulator: the design wrapped around the seat; it shapes what the head gets to see.
    IRegulator · ColonyRegulator · SelfModelRegulator · MapKeeperRegulator · OrientingRegulator · HybridRegulator
  3. 3
    The halo
    The control layer: it watches every act from above: what may be seen, what may be done, what really happened.
    ControlLayer: Visibility · Gatekeeper · EffectCheck · Ledger
  4. 4
    The star
    The task: the goal it steers by, read from the facts and never from a report.
    AgentTask · AgentTask.Goal
  5. 5
    The body
    The loop: it carries everything, tick after tick.
    ReferenceLoop · ITickedWorld
  6. 6
    The raised paw
    Acting: the only part that touches the world, and the world answers, sometimes with a lie.
    Tool · ActionOutcome · ActionVerdict
  7. 7
    The legs
    The vessel: what it stands on: the computer, the machine it drives, and the model.
    Vessel · Hardware · PhysicalMachine
  8. 8
    The wings
    The cells: how it reaches beyond one vessel: identity, the signed ledger, the hub and the mesh.
    CreaturaId · CellKey · WorkLedger · LedgerSyncNode
  9. 9
    The tail
    The record: what trails behind it: what it earned across cases, and the trace it gives off.
    AgentRecord · IRecordStore · TraceEvent
  10. 10
    The tail’s tuft
    The extensions: loose behaviours hooked on the loop’s verbs, after the regulator.
    IAgentExtension · RoadDistrustExtension · CriticExtension
  11. 11
    The ground
    The bench: where every creatura is trained and tested: worlds that lie, an oracle it cannot fool, batteries stated before they run.
    IOracle · Battery · Hypothesis · ConvoyBattery
One animal, many parts, one direction. The head chooses, but only among what the halo lets it see, and the halo judges every act of the paw by what happened in the world rather than by what the paw reports. The wings carry its work to other creaturas; the tail keeps what it has earned. It stands on the bench, where every claim about it is tested before it is believed.
Plate II

The parts, and who talks to whom

Creatura the agent: a loop with a regulator in it IDENTITY · WHO role · principal commitments · scope VESSEL · WHAT IT STANDS ON computer · machine · model Hardware · PhysicalMachine WHERE its place on the network in-process · mesh · internet Regulator the design · fills the loop's slots SLOT error signal set point · prediction · anomaly what error buys freedom, a retry budget memory colony · self-model · story map gate and stop stage interlock · collapse · hand-off Colony · SelfModel · MapKeeper Orienting · Hybrid Seat a model, a network, or a planner ModelPolicy · NetworkSeat one visible tool, or none Extensions honest · explore · record critic · biology · distrust hooked on the loop's verbs ReferenceLoop one tick: offer → decide → admit → act → judge → record → stop? (plate III) Record what it has earned skills · predictions · stage · coherence · territory carried across cases by the record store: a Trainer earns it, an Exam freezes it. A creatura can change seat or move vessel and keep its record. Control layer the membrane Visibility Offer() what the seat may see: distrust → regulator shapes → extensions Gatekeeper Admit() is it visible? is the gate earned? refuse, never obey EffectCheck Judge() did the effect land? landed · lied · honest failure Ledger the layer's own: a SelfModel quarantine · predictions audit · not the cells' WorkLedger World the simulator: where a creatura is trained and tested Facts the registry: the only truth What is actually the case. A creatura reads it; only an action can change it. Tools requires · grants · kind They may lie (report success, change nothing), fail honestly, or vanish. Barriers faults injected on purpose revoke a tool · lie once · lie always · a shortcut that looks like the goal · an approval to earn Oracle goal as evidence The goal is a fact the creatura cannot write itself. Outcome: real · claimed · handed off · open. Controls baselines beside the creatura careless · random walker · adversary · oracle planner: same tools, no control layer, so a result means something. Several creaturas one world, stepped tick by tick ITickedWorld · Creatura.Scenarios The convoy: three trucks, each a creatura with its own view (TruckView) and sensors that can lie, coordinating through their cells over an in-memory mesh (plate IV). Monstrum the trace: what the creatura shows a row per step at three levels (cell · tissue · organism), notes, the route, claims and calls. Golden traces pin them; a changed row is a decision. Augur the critic: reads the signs, has no hands Watches the route. A claim cites a fact or stays silent. The right to interrupt is earned by precision and lost on noise. The owner, not the agent, holds the off switch. Cells how a creatura reaches beyond one vessel (plate IV) · namespace Creatura.Cells Identity CreaturaId · CellKey · OwnerKey Work ledger signed, append-only WorkLedger · SignedEntry Hub and sync LedgerSyncNode · HubRequest Shared files CellCipher · SharedFiles offers proposes acts facts verdict at sleep gives off reads writes its work: claims, progress, warnings
The membrane is the point. The seat never touches the world directly. The control layer decides what the model may see, refuses what it may not do, and judges every action by the facts rather than by the tool's report; only then does the verdict reach the regulator's memory. Two ledgers, two jobs: the control layer's ledger is the creatura's own memory of its tools (a SelfModel); the cells' WorkLedger is the signed record of who is working on what, shared with other creaturas.
Plate III

One tick of the loop

Stop? regulator contract · alarm Offer distrust → shape → extensions Freedom error → freedom → retry budget Decide ask the seat or fixed · or skip Admit visible? gate earned? Act in the world the tool reports Judge did the effect land? landed · lied · honest Record memory · ledger trace row Goal? read from the facts, never the report refused (not visible, or gate not earned): recorded, nothing acted hand off · an extension may veto met: "contract met", stop → not met: next tick, failures carried, quarantine decaying by one lied → quarantine, failure counted honest → budget spent, tool stays a name outside the visible set is refused, not obeyed
Every regulator runs this same tick. The slots it fills are the stop check, the shaping of the offer, the error and what it buys, the decision kind, the gate, the memory update, and what the seat gets to read. Levin, Bach, Peterson, Sokolov and the hybrid differ only inside those slots; all five regulators run on this one loop, and so does the plain loop that fills no slot at all.
Plate IV

The mesh: how creaturas share their work

Every creatura keeps a complete copy of the work ledger. Nothing is the single source of truth: entries are signed by the cell that wrote them, copied between vessels, and checked again wherever they arrive. The same ledger runs in two places: across real vessels, through a hub on a private network; and inside one simulated world, where trucks pass entries over an in-memory mesh.

ACROSS VESSELS · THE CELLS' MESH Private mesh network a private network that only the owner's machines can join; the hub listens on its mesh address, never on every interface The laptop the owner's vessel, holding the owner key Owner key OwnerKey endorses each vessel's cell Cell and ledger LocalCell · WorkLedger Claude Code hooks write claims The hub creatura-hub keeps the deltas (hub.db) and the shared files' sealed bytes; holds no cell key, so it can relay entries but never forge one launchd runs it, and a sync of this cell every 60 seconds A second machine a second vessel, joined once: request → endorse → accept the owner's vessel signs its cell into a VesselEndorsement Cell and ledger a full copy of the ledger; its hooks write its own claims syncs with the hub on demand push · pull push · pull Every sync request is signed X-Creatura-Endorsement · X-Creatura-Time · X-Creatura-Signature The hub refuses a request whose cell the owner did not endorse, one older than five minutes, one it has seen before (a replay), and anything from a cell the owner revoked (a lost vessel). Then every cell checks every entry again when it merges: the signature, the endorsement, the payload. The hub needs no private key It does not need the owner's private key, only the owner's public key: creatura-hub --listen <mesh address> --trust owner.pub --data <dir> so it can run on any machine on the network, and the vessels keep syncing. INSIDE ONE WORLD · THE CONVOY'S MESH Truck 1 cell · ledger own view Truck 2 cell · ledger own view Truck 3 cell · ledger own view ScenarioMesh next tick · seeded loss, delay WHAT THE TRUCKS SAY hello · claim · progress · release hand-off · heartbeat · warning A claim says "this village is mine"; a warning says "this road lies". An entry reaches the others the tick after it is written; in arm D, 30% are lost and some arrive late. After the run, a final sync leaves every truck's ledger identical, byte for byte.

How one entry travels

  1. A cell writes an entry: its next sequence number, the time, the kind and the payload, signed with its CellKey and carrying the owner's endorsement.
  2. It goes into the cell's own ledger first, on disk (ledger.json, or ledger.db with SQLite).
  3. A sync pushes what the hub has not seen and pulls what this cell has not seen, as deltas, in one signed request.
  4. The hub checks the request and keeps the deltas; it never needs to open an entry to relay it.
  5. Every cell that pulls the entry checks its signature and endorsement again before merging it.
  6. Every ledger sorts its entries the same way (time, cell, sequence), so two vessels with the same entries hold the same ledger.

What the ledger is for

Claims, progress, hand-offs and releases say who is working on what, so two creaturas do not do the same job: in the convoy, a ledger cut wasted trips from 290 to 0 over 50 seeds. Heartbeats show who is still alive, so a silent creatura's claim can be taken over. Shared files travel as sealed artifacts, readable only by the cells they were sealed for. Warnings carry what one creatura saw to all the others: with roads shared that way, no truck drove a road another had already caught lying.

The design: design-cells.md and design-shared-files.md; the convoy: design-machine-vessels.md.

A relay, not a master. The hub stores and forwards; it cannot write in any cell's name. The owner's key decides which cells belong, and a revocation from the owner shuts a lost vessel out everywhere it reaches.
Plate V

The tools around it: inside the loop, or beside it

Creatura meets other agent tools in two ways. As a host, its control layer rides the tool's own function-calling loop: it decides what the model sees, admits or refuses each call, and judges every result by the facts. As a cell, the tool keeps its own loop and its own memory, and joins the signed work ledger through its hooks, so every vessel can see who is working on what, and the owner can offer it a goal. The tags say what exists today.

INSIDE THE TOOL'S LOOP · A HOST The framework's own loop the host owns the model call and the tool calls; Creatura rides them what the model reads: the verdict, never the tool's claim request one tick the model any IChatClient a tool call it names one the tool acts in the world offer admit judge The control layer offers only trusted tools, refuses the rest, judges each call by the facts, and ends the host's loop when the failure budget is spent WHERE IT RIDES BUILT Microsoft Agent Frameworkmiddleware around each call, tools filtered BUILT Semantic Kernelan auto-invocation filter, tools filtered ON PAPER OpenClawits hooks mapped onto the same steps ON PAPER Hermesmapped the same way, not built ON PAPER Copilot SDKmapped the same way, not built BESIDE THE TOOL · A CELL The tool keeps its own loop and its own memory; it joins the signed ledger through its hooks A Claude Code session SessionStart UserPromptSubmit PostToolUse Stop SessionEnd its hook events creatura cell hook each The cell's ledger a claim at the first prompt a step after each turn a hand-off at the end signed, and synced to every vessel entry an offer from the owner, shown to the person at session start; taken by naming it WHO JOINS BUILT Claude Codehooks write claims and steps; offers at start DESIGNED Codexnotify after each turn; offers from a terminal BUILT Any shellclaim, progress, release, take, by hand BUILT Creatura's loopsthe convoy's trucks, a cell each NOT YET OpenClaw, othersany tool that runs a command on its events A host makes Creatura the membrane. It decides what the model may see, refuses what it may not do, and judges every call by the facts; the run stops when the budget is spent. One tick is one model request. A cell makes Creatura the record. It says who is working on what, on which vessel, and how it ended, and it carries the owner's offers. It does not touch the tool's own calls.
Two ways in, and a tool can use both. A Claude Code session joins as a cell today; a Semantic Kernel or Agent Framework agent can be a host for the control layer and write to a cell as well. Built means code and tests in this repository; designed means a design note says how; on paper means the tool's hooks are mapped onto the layer's steps and nothing more; not yet means neither. The hosts: README, Hosts; the cells and offers: design-cells.md and design-activity-stream.md.
The kinds of things

What each word means

kindwhat it isin code
creaturaan assembled agent: the loop with a regulator in it, plus its identity, seat and extensionsReferenceLoop
regulatora design. Fills the loop's slots: error signal, what error buys, memory, gate and stopIRegulator, ColonyRegulator, SelfModelRegulator, MapKeeperRegulator, HybridRegulator, OrientingRegulator
jointwo regulators in one creatura under one fold law per slotRegulators.Join, JoinRules
control layerthe membrane between seat and world: what may be seen, what may be done, what really happened. Its ledger is the creatura's memory of its toolsControlLayer: Visibility, Gatekeeper, EffectCheck, Ledger (SelfModel)
seatwhatever fills the decision slot: a catalogued model, a trained network, or an offline plannerIPolicy, SeatView, ModelPolicy, NetworkSeat
identitywho the agent is, the vessel it runs in, where it sits on the networkIdentity, Vessel
vesselwhat a creatura stands on: the computer, the machine it drives, the modelVessel, Hardware, PhysicalMachine
extensiona loadable behaviour hooked on the loop's verbs after the regulatorIAgentExtension
worlda fact registry plus tools that may lie, fail honestly or vanish; the registry is the only truthIWorldView, IWorld, ITickedWorld
scenarioseveral creaturas in one world, stepped one tick at a time: the convoyConvoyWorld, TruckView, ScenarioMesh
barriera fault injected on purpose to test the creatura againstFaultRule, Barrier
controla baseline run beside the creatura in the same world: careless, random, adversary, oracle plannerplain IAgent
oraclethe goal as evidence the agent cannot author; classifies a run as real, claimed, handed off or openAgentTask.Goal, IOracle
batterya pre-registered experiment: hypotheses first, arms with controls, repeats, scored held or failedBattery, Hypothesis, ConvoyBattery
critican owned observer with no hands: record and replay, judgement, governanceHotzAgent, CriticExtension
recordwhat a creatura earns across cases; a trainer earns it, an exam freezes itAgentRecord, IRecordStore
tracethe observable run: rows, notes, routes, calls; golden traces pin themTraceEvent, AgentRun
cella creatura's identity on one vessel: its key, endorsed by the ownerCreaturaId, CellKey, LocalCell, VesselEndorsement
work ledgerthe signed, append-only record of who is working on what, copied to every cellWorkLedger, SignedEntry, EntryKind
huba relay the cells sync through; it checks every request and cannot forge an entrycreatura-hub, LedgerSyncNode, HubRequest, Revocation
hosta runtime that owns the model call and hands the layer its hooksAgent Framework middleware; a Semantic Kernel filter
The Latin

Five words, and why they are exact

Creatura creatūra, -ae · from creare, to bring forth
That which has been made. First the whole created order, then each made thing: so the singular names the framework and one agent alike. The learned form of Spanish criatura.
Monstrum monstrum, -i · from monere, to warn; root of monstrare, to show
A sign, a portent: the thing that appears in order to point at something. The trace is what a creatura shows; a monster is only a creature that has become a message.
Augur augur, -uris · the reader of signs
The one who reads what the creatura shows and answers yes or no, with standing but without hands. The Hotz critic: it cites or stays silent, earns the right to interrupt, and never acts.
Bestiarium bestiārium, -i · medieval, a book of beasts
The catalogue of creature designs and switches by name, each with its nature described. Never called a registry: that word belongs to the world's facts.
Vessel English, after vas electionis · a person as a chosen vessel
The hardware and the model a creatura inhabits. Kept in English because Spanish vas means "you go"; the Latin stays as etymology.

Sources: docs/sources.md; the people named did not take part in Creatura and do not endorse it. Code: egarim/creatura. State on 2026-10-28: all five regulators run on the one loop; seats take catalogued models and trained networks; cells sync through a hub with signed requests, revocation and shared files; the convoy runs several creaturas in one world. The icon is the project's own: a winged lion with a halo and a star.