Agents and self-healing

FDAI runs as a fixed organization of 15 named agents. Each agent has one mandate, owns a set of object and action types, and talks on a schema-checked event bus. The org chart is the safety model: the agent that judges never executes, and the agent that executes never holds your approval. When a resource drifts or something fails, the agents work together to fix it. Promoted low-risk actions run on their own, and high-risk actions wait for your approval. How much runs automatically is a measured target, not a promised product number.

This page explains who the agents are, how they split duties, how you stay at the approve-or-reject level, and how they heal a failure end to end.

The organization

The set of agents is defined once upstream and a fork never changes it. Odin plans, Forseti judges, Thor executes, and the staff agents govern the catalog and the memory.

graph TD
  Odin["Odin - Master Planner"]
  Odin --> Thor["Thor - Responder / Executor"]
  Odin --> Forseti["Forseti - Judge"]
  Odin -. staff .-> Mimir["Mimir - Rule Final owner owner"]
  Odin -. staff .-> Saga["Saga - Auditor"]
  Odin -. staff .-> Norns["Norns - Learner"]
  Odin -. staff .-> Muninn["Muninn - Memory"]
  Thor --> Vidar["Vidar - Recovery"]
  Thor --> Var["Var - Approver"]
  Thor --> Bragi["Bragi - Narrator"]
  Forseti --> Huginn["Huginn - Event Collector / Resource Discovery"]
  Forseti --> Heimdall["Heimdall - Observer"]
  Forseti --> Njord["Njord - Cost"]
  Forseti --> Freyr["Freyr - Capacity"]
  Forseti --> Loki["Loki - Chaos"]

Agent	Role	In one line
Odin	Master Planner	Arbitrates cross-vertical conflicts; final tie-breaker
Forseti	Judge	Issues the decision (auto / human approval / deny); never executes
Thor	Responder	Dispatches decisions; the sole privileged executor
Var	Approver	Carries human approval; distinct from Thor
Vidar	Recovery	Owns rollback and DR failover
Huginn	Event Collector / Resource Discovery	Owns real-time resource-change ingress and correlation
Heimdall	Observer	Watches discovery freshness, coverage, drift, and resource change
Njord / Freyr / Loki	Specialists	Advise on cost, capacity, and chaos, and never execute
Mimir / Norns / Muninn	Governance staff	Rule ownership, learning, memory
Saga	Auditor	Writes the append-only audit log
Bragi	Narrator	Translates your questions to and from the pipeline

Separation of duties

The safety guarantees come from what each agent is not allowed to do:

The judge is not the executor. Forseti decides and Thor acts. No agent both judges and executes, so a bad judgment cannot approve itself into a change.
Approval is a separate principal. Var carries your approval, and Thor cannot approve on your behalf.
Specialists advise, they do not act. Njord, Freyr, and Loki feed the judgment. They never reach the executor directly.
Two ports, no bypass. Every agent has a typed pub/sub port for machine traffic and a conversational port for your questions. A conversation that asks for an action has to re-enter the typed pipeline, so the narrator can never execute anything itself.

You operate at approve-or-reject

You do not drive the agents task by task. The organization runs the loop and brings decisions to you:

Promoted low-risk actions can resolve themselves with a stop condition, a rollback path, an impact scope limit, and an audit entry. A new action stays in observation mode until its evidence clears the promotion gate.
The risky few wait for you. An approval card arrives in the channel you already use, such as Teams or Slack, and you approve or reject it. A rejection and a timeout both end as an audited no-op.
You can ask questions in plain language through Bragi, such as “why did this fail over?”, and get an answer backed by evidence. You never need the executor’s privileged identity to do it.

Full walkthrough: ../guides/approve-change.md.

How a failure self-heals

When a resource degrades, the agents collaborate through the same pipeline that handles every event. Here is one failover, end to end:

graph LR
  Huginn["Huginn<br/>discovers changes"] --> Heimdall["Heimdall<br/>checks coverage"]
  Heimdall --> Forseti["Forseti<br/>judges decision"]
  Njord -. advises .-> Forseti
  Freyr -. advises .-> Forseti
  Forseti -->|auto| Thor["Thor<br/>executes"]
  Forseti -->|human approval| Var["Var<br/>your approval"]
  Var --> Thor
  Thor --> Vidar["Vidar<br/>rollback / failover"]
  Vidar --> Saga["Saga<br/>audits"]
  Thor --> Saga
  Saga -. signals .-> Norns["Norns<br/>learns"]

Sense. Huginn takes in resource changes and failure signals in real time. The periodic Inventory job catches anything missed, and Heimdall checks freshness and coverage so the signals become one incident instead of an alert storm.
Judge. Forseti scores the incident, asks the specialists about cost and capacity trade-offs, and issues a decision: run it, request approval, or deny.
Act. Thor dispatches. Low-risk recovery runs on its own, while a high-risk failover waits for Var to carry your approval.
Recover. Vidar owns the rollback or DR failover, bounded by the action’s stop conditions and impact scope.
Record and learn. Saga writes the audit entry. Norns turns recurring patterns into inactive catalog candidates, and each candidate still needs provenance, review, regression tests, and observation-mode evidence before it can be promoted.

Specialists sometimes disagree about the same resource. Njord may want scale_down to cut cost while Freyr wants scale_up for capacity. Odin settles that before Forseti finalizes the decision, so competing goals never race each other to the executor.

When an agent is unavailable

Self-healing covers the organization itself. A missing role lowers autonomy. It never lets another agent take over authority it was not given.

Unavailable role	Safe degradation
Forseti (judge)	No new decision is issued, and the case waits for human approval
Thor (executor)	Judgment and audit continue, but nothing changes
Var (approver)	Approval requests stay queued, and a timeout ends as an audited no-op
Vidar (recovery)	Actions that need rollback or failover cannot run automatically
Saga (auditor)	Changes stop, because no outcome could satisfy the audit requirement
Odin (arbitrator)	Cross-vertical conflicts go to human approval instead of picking a winner

An agent never quietly stands in for a failed peer. Recovery restores the declared role and replays pending judgment only. It never re-runs an action from a conversation or an old delivery message.

How to know the organization is healthy

Useful health signals mix agent state with control-loop outcomes:

event ingestion lag, dead-letter depth, and correlation backlog
decision latency, disagreement between models, and how often approvals expire
execution success, stop-condition activations, and rollback rate
audit completeness and the time from final outcome to a durable record
each agent’s degradation state and how long it stayed below its normal autonomy ceiling

The goal is not to maximize automatic execution. A healthy organization lowers autonomy when these signals degrade and shows operators why.

Next steps

To learn about	Read
How every action inherits its safety contract	ontology-driven-automation.md
How decisions become auto vs human approval	risk-tiers.md
Approving or rejecting a queued change	../guides/approve-change.md
Tracing a decision through the audit log	../guides/read-audit-log.md
The full pantheon design	../../roadmap/agents/agent-pantheon.md