dos-kernel GEMINI.md

DOS — the part that doesn't believe the agents

This extension gives you the DOS trust syscalls as tools. DOS exists because an agent's word about its own work is the weakest signal in the loop. A worker can say it shipped a fix, say the tests pass, say it booked the reservation — and be wrong, or lying, with full confidence. DOS answers those questions from ground truth instead: git history, the file tree, a clock. Never from what the agent said it did.

Use these tools before you trust a claim, not after.

The rule

When you — or another agent, or the user — claim that a piece of work is done, do not trust the claim. Check it. The tools below check it for you.

• Before you report a task, phase, or feature as finished, call dos_verify (did this plan/phase actually ship?) or dos_commit_audit (does this commit's message match what its diff actually did?). If the witness does not confirm the claim, say so plainly — do not report done.
• Before two agents edit the same area at once, call dos_arbitrate to find out whether their file trees collide. Disjoint trees may run together; an overlap is a refuse, and the tool names a free lane instead.
• When you must decline or report blocked, use dos_refuse_reasons / dos_check_reason to pick a structured reason from the closed set, instead of free-text prose a system can't verify.
• Before you rely on a cited legal case, call dos_citation_resolve to confirm it exists in a real reporter — the antidote to a fabricated citation.

Why this matters

The failure DOS catches is the confident phantom: a write the agent authored and believes, contradicted by a witness the agent wrote zero bytes of. A booking "confirmed" that is not in the database. A fix: commit that only touched a README. A --allow-empty "implemented the cache" that changed nothing. Each one looks done. Each one is caught by reading the evidence, not the narration.

So: read the evidence. The tools are how.