Agents

Not Rest Inc. · Capabilities · Bounded actors, on the record

An agent is a bounded actor with an explicit contract: what it can do, what it needs, what it is allowed to touch. Not a model with a to-do list — a unit of responsibility. The model supplies reasoning; the contract supplies trust; the record supplies accountability. That triple is what separates an agent you can delegate to from a chatbot you can only supervise.

At not.rest, agents are not a claim — they are on the record, twice over, and you can check both.

This site runs on them

The page you're reading sits inside a system of nine declared agents — the field, the rings, the concierge, the kernel — each with a public contract at /agents/index.json stating its purpose, its permitted effects, and its prohibitions. The deploy pipeline refuses to ship if the code and the declarations disagree. Open the declarations and audit the front door you're standing in.

Our working sessions run on them too

The not.rest session harness — open-source at github.com/notrestai/notrest — delegates real work as an agent swarm: the main seat keeps judgment (decompose, judge, apply, gate), and concurrent agent lanes carry everything else. Every delegation is named before it runs; every agent's conclusion is machine-written to an append-only record with its transcript path; every model spend lands in a receipt ledger. Delegation without records is just hoping — so the records are the feature.

The rule underneath both: an agent earns exactly the authority its contract declares, and accountability composes back up to whoever delegated. Work flows down; responsibility flows up; nothing disappears into the tree.