Cradle-to-grave traceability for AI-assisted engineering — as substrate-pluggable, open-source primitives.
Autonomous agents are entering regulated engineering environments faster than the trust, audit, and lifecycle disciplines those environments require. Without a substrate that binds every agent action to a verified principal, every policy decision to a recorded determination, every knowledge citation to its source, and every state-affecting operation to an append-only audit ledger, the output of an agentic system cannot pass the certification gates that FAA-certified avionics, FDA-regulated devices, nuclear control systems, and the EU AI Act impose.
Fiducial Mesh is the open-source platform that supplies those primitives — and keeps them portable across the operator's own choice of substrate (secret store, directory, database, isolation runtime, telemetry backend), so sovereignty is a property of the architecture, not a vendor lock-in.
Eight pillar contracts plus a pluggable host frame. Each pillar specifies what capability it requires from substrate, not which product provides it — and conformance is mechanically verified against a named profile set before any plugin reaches production.
| Pillar | Plane | |
|---|---|---|
| IBX | Inbox Exchange — agent message/work queue | State |
| IAM | Identity & Access Management — sovereign agent identity lifecycle | Issuance + Control |
| PGE | Policy Guardrail Engine — deterministic, owned policy enforcement | Control |
| ACT | Agent Cognitive Telemetry — append-only audit + observability | State |
| AKB | Agent Knowledge Base — grounded, citable knowledge retrieval | State |
| PCS | Plugin Control System — plugin/workflow lifecycle + conformance + registry | Control |
| CRB | Compute Resource Broker — workload dispatch | Control |
| DPG | Deterministic Proving Ground — ephemeral execution isolation | Compute |
| MCC | Mesh Control Center — the host frame that composes the pillars (not a pillar) | — |
The load-bearing structural commitment is the Management + Control dyad: runtime control (admission, dispatch, isolation, enforcement) is structurally separated from management (identity lifecycle, telemetry/audit, knowledge, conformance) — exhibited by the contract structure itself, not maintained by operator discipline.
The Specification is what you build to; the Handbook is what you read to understand it.
FIDUCIAL-MESH-SPEC-001— the normative requirements (RFC 2119, numberedFM-*IDs, per-pillar Conformance Profiles). Current: v1.2.1.FIDUCIAL-MESH-HDBK-001— the companion narrative: design history, the dialectical-review record, worked examples.
Both are developed in the open through a multi-agent dialectical review chain (author → adversarial review → first-principles review → human integrator) — a method that is itself part of the credited design.
Archived, citable releases (CC-BY-4.0):
- Specification — SPEC-001 v1.2.1 — DOI
10.5281/zenodo.21109753 - Handbook — HDBK-001 v1.2.1 — DOI
10.5281/zenodo.21110034
The companion paper publishes under its own DOI.
- Mesh software — GPL-3.0
- Specification & Handbook — CC-BY-4.0
Copyright © 2026 Agentics Labs LLC.
Early and active. The Specification is at v1.2.1; the reference implementation is being built and proven against the lab that produced the Specification — the lab is the reference implementation. Repositories flip public per-module as each clears its security and provenance gates.