• Adoption · v1.1 · Apache 2.0
The standard ships five portable building blocks. Scaffold them into any codebase with one command. Pick the levels you want. Wire the gates into your CI. The constitution is now the layer your agents cannot route around.
This page is the how-to. The standard itself lives at github.com/Software-Constitution/spec; the kit lives at public/oss/software-constitution/kit/ in any adopting project.
Install
From any project root, run the scaffolder against the path to the target repo. It copies the kit + the wake-up contract + a starter constitution-kit.json manifest into the target.
# From a repo that already vends the kit (e.g. KYE-Protocol/app):
node public/oss/software-constitution/kit/init.mjs /path/to/your/target-repo
# Then in your target repo:
node public/oss/software-constitution/kit/run.mjs
# → reads constitution-kit.json, runs every declared gate, reports L0–L4 verdict.The kit is single-file at heart (run.mjs + init.mjs) + a lib/ + a recipes/ directory + the manifest schema. No npm install. No build step. Apache 2.0.
The five portable building blocks
Each is independent. Each is Apache 2.0. Each is the same impl the upstream protocol (KYE Protocol™) dogfoods on its own codebase.
1 / Kit public/oss/software-constitution/kit/{run.mjs,init.mjs,lib/,schema/,recipes/}. Reads constitution-kit.json, runs every declared gate, emits an L0–L4 verdict. Pluggable recipes (canonical-triple coverage, visual-verify, heartbeat-notification-noise).
2 / Wake-up contract public/oss/software-constitution/kit/wake-up-contract/. Three independent layers: L1 per-PR webhook, L2 post-push verifier (verify-ci-triggered.mjs ≤ 90s), L3 session-resume (signal-ingest.sh + signal-sources.json). Plus the subagent dead-man's-switch (subagent-heartbeat-check.mjs). Silence stops being a state your codebase tolerates.
3 / Canonical-triple discipline The §0 red line: every canonical concept appears exactly once. The kit ships a recipe (recipes/canonical-triple-coverage.mjs) that hard-fails any PR that introduces a parallel implementation of an already-canonical concept.
4 / Self-description gate Every constitution chapter / amendment binds to at least one executing enforcer. An unenforced chapter carries a decay deadline; silent extension is itself a violation. Pattern: enforcement-map.json + a self-description gate that fails when the map disagrees with the runtime.
5 / IP/OSS line Explicit path-rule (§33): what is OSS-track (carries SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0), what is IP-track (no SPDX, no mechanism content in public/). The kit ships a gate (ip-oss-line.mjs) that enforces this on every merge.
Adopting in five steps
01 Run the one-line install above. The kit lands at public/oss/software-constitution/kit/. A starter constitution-kit.json lands at your repo root.
02 Edit constitution-kit.json — list the registries your codebase has (schemas, vocabularies, manifests, etc.) + the canonical-uniqueness concepts to enforce.
03 Copy signal-sources.json.template → .claude/signal-sources.json (or your agent harness's equivalent). Add scripts/ci/verify-ci-triggered.mjs as a post-push hook.
04 One line in your CI: node public/oss/software-constitution/kit/run.mjs. It exits non-zero on any violation. Block merges on it.
05 The standard now governs the codebase. Every change to a governed surface follows the amendment-PR pattern: declare the lock, name the enforcer, watch the gate go green.
The reference adoption
The upstream protocol that produced this kit (KYE Protocol™) runs the exact same files on its own monorepo. 119 gates, 86 self-description subjects bound to enforcers, < 1% unenforced backlog, 53-chapter constitution with every chapter machine-readable. The kit you install is the kit they ship.
If you want to see the maximalist case — a banking-grade regulated-buyer-targeted protocol governed by this standard end-to-end — the source is at github.com/KYE-Protocol/app (when published). The kit itself is independent and self-contained.
Canonical KYE™ surfaces referenced on this page: KYE™ Constitution Kit · KYE Protocol™.