The pieces
Workflow markdown is the policy SSOT. Aworkflow.md file declares the
runtime, budget, tools, sandbox, retries, review rules, state machine, and
selection policy. Authors write policy, never imperative provider code.
Cadence owns the run. Cadence is a local Elixir/OTP sidecar that validates
workflow frontmatter, reduces it to a run payload, owns ticket lifecycle and
budgets, performs provider selection, and advances workflows from typed
harness events on a :harness event bus. Dispatchers are pure executors of
the route Cadence resolves.
The runtime catalog describes what each runtime can do — its capability
flags, requirements, recommended models, and which provider catalog rows it
represents. The provider option ledger maps provider-specific knobs into
workflow-safe configuration.
The broker enforces the granted operation surface. Providers are execution
backends, not principals: the workflow policy decides what an agent may do,
and every brokered call is checked against that grant.
The harness compiler builds the final prompt/config for the selected
backend. Headroom (context compression), when enabled for a provider, runs
before the provider call and emits evidence either way.
Status
All 10 runtimes are available, and the provider capability catalog has zero deferred rows — every one of its 2,058 rows is in an explicit, audited terminal state, enforced in CI by a ratchet test. See the Capability Catalog for what that means in detail.Zero deferred does not mean every provider surface is implemented. It means
there is no unowned backlog: every row is usable, policy-blocked,
vendor-blocked with a sourced and dated reason, or unsupported by the vendor.