Principal

Principal is the governance layer for every AI agent Knox runs. 24 agents across trading, content, intelligence, and infrastructure — each with an authority ceiling that defines exactly what it can and cannot do without escalation.

The problem it solves: when you run 24 agents across 3 machines, there is no chain of command. Every agent operates in isolation. Knox manually relays information between systems, approves actions, monitors health, and intervenes when things break. That is 480 minutes of operational overhead per day. Principal makes that trend toward 15.

Architecture: FastAPI broker on Knox:8400, NATS message routing, 9 deterministic routing rules (no LLM in the critical path). Messages flow through a hard pipeline: deserialize, validate schema, check authority ceiling, route to handler, audit trail, dispatch response. If an agent tries to exceed its authority, the message converts to an escalation — it does not fail silently and it does not get through.

The kill switch is the safety floor. Four levels: L1 halts a single asset, L2 halts all trading, L3 freezes all agent operations, L4 shuts everything down including infrastructure. Halt state persists to SQLite — if the broker restarts (launchd KeepAlive), it comes back in the same halt level. Kill switch drill passed L1-L3 on day one. L4 is the nuclear option.

13 OKRs tracked with real data, wired through 5 daily metric aggregation scripts that read from Sentinel, Apollo, Foresight, and Shiva. Fleet uptime, autonomous incident resolution, trading P&L, content pipeline health, daily ops time — all flowing through the broker into Mission Control's cockpit.

The north star metric: Knox daily operational minutes. Currently 480. Target: 15. Every agent wired, every OKR tracked, every incident auto-resolved moves the number down. Principal is what makes autonomous governance possible — not by removing human judgment, but by making it unnecessary for routine decisions.

430+ tests. 98% coverage. SQLite-persisted halt state and directives. Heartbeat bridge monitoring 22 active agents. The system is running. Let it run.