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The Three Planes

r5e separates system state into three planes (per ADR-0001):

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Durable Control Plane

Resources and graphs represent semantic truth the system can inspect, reconcile, query, and recover from. Kinds: Graph, Node, Task, Agent, Harness, Tool, AgentSession, Workflow, Artifact, Capability, Guideline, Policy, GANRun, WebhookSubscription, CustomResourceDefinition All resources follow the spec/status pattern — you declare what you want (spec), the system reconciles toward it and reports what it observes (status).

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Live Execution Plane

OTP and Jido processes host in-flight work. Running model sessions, orchestration loops, harness subprocesses, retry timers. This plane is operational, not authoritative. It must be able to fail and be rebuilt from durable state plus external inputs.

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Historical Audit Plane

Events, artifacts, and attestations record what happened. The event log is append-only and hash-chained. Artifacts are content-addressed and immutable. This plane provides provenance, diagnostics, and trust — but it is not a replacement for current semantic truth.

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The Three Contracts

Each plane has a contract that any backend can implement:
ContractInterfacev1alpha Backend
Graph Storagecreate, get, update, list, traverse, query_by_labelsPostgres + JSONB + GIN
Event Logappend, query, verify_chain, streamPostgres (append-only table)
CASstore, resolve, exists?, delete, list_digestsLocal filesystem
The contracts are backend-agnostic. Postgres handles everything for v1alpha. Enterprise deployments can swap backends per contract without changing the API.

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The Work Chain

Graph (container)
  └── Node (what needs to happen)
       └── Task (specific work on a workflow step)
            └── AgentSession (an agent doing the work)
                 └── Artifacts (immutable outputs with lineage)

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Governance Model

  • Policy evaluates at admission — before work starts, not after
  • Authority narrows monotonically from parent to child
  • Review is mandatory and independent — the producer cannot certify its own output
  • Reflect is mandatory — every session assesses what went well and what didn’t
  • Events are hash-chained — tamper-evident, externally verifiable