RCGov — Mobius Reflective Context Governor

RCGov cleans and governs AI context before the model reads it.

RCGov is a local-first semantic hygiene and context-governance tool for LLM systems. Instead of trying to make a bigger context window, it provides a cleaner intake: raw project material is turned into reviewable, gated, provenance-preserved, disagreement-aware context packs before a model is allowed to drink it.

The governing axiom is the context-side companion to Mobius answer entitlement:

CommitAnswer_t  => ReflectiveReady_t      # answer only when justified
InjectContext_t => ContextReady_t         # inject only what is fit to govern

What RCGov prevents

Raw project material entering an AI system as flat, undifferentiated text: secrets, prompt-injection residue, stale specs, deprecated rules, contradictory notes, uncommitted authority, temporary tool errors, copied hallucinations, and low-provenance claims.

Status

Pre-alpha / Personal MVP. The full governance pipeline runs end-to-end: rcgov govern ingests files and emits every contract artifact. Implemented:

• the data contract layer (src/rcgov/contract/), strictly conformant to Minimal Data Contract v0.1;
• ingest (encoding repair + content-addressed store), segment (markdown heading-aware, provenance-preserving), scan (regex+entropy secrets, imperative prompt-injection seeds), propose (transparent low-confidence keyword heuristics), provenance, the non-compensatory gate layer, priority (lexical TF-cosine), conflict detection (drift detectors routed via friction governance), and pack rendering;
• the canonical papers under docs/.

Model-independent by design (Decision Record 4): the ME5 embedding path is an opt-in upgrade of relevance scoring, not a dependency. Authority/temporal proposals are deliberately low-confidence and surfaced for review — RCGov's thesis is to surface disagreement, not to trust automatic authority classification.

Architecture (robust core first)

Input Files
  -> Ingest
  -> Segment
  -> Secret / Prompt-Injection Scan
  -> Role / Authority / Temporal Proposal
  -> Provenance Appraisal
  -> Non-Compensatory Gates          # safety, injection, provenance, authority-commitment, severe-conflict
  -> Priority Ranking                # admitted segments only
  -> Pack Placement
  -> Clean Context Pack + Non-Injection Report + Override/Outcome logs

Non-compensatory means high relevance can never compensate for a secret, an unsafe instruction, missing provenance, or uncommitted authority. Gates run before scoring.

Three levels of confidence (honesty statement)

1. Robust engineering core — gates, provenance, secret exclusion, deprecated-context separation, authority-disagreement surfacing. Implementable now, useful even if the temporal hypothesis fails.
2. Implementation contract — the reduced label space in src/rcgov/contract/. Required before implementation.
3. Experimental bet — Annales-derived temporal-attention pack placement. Shipped as an opt-in profile, not a core product claim. If a non-temporal attention-optimal baseline ties or wins the ablation, temporal strata are demoted to explanatory ontology.

Quick start (scaffold)

python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest                      # tests should be green

# Dogfooding: govern RCGov's own documentation into a clean pack
rcgov govern docs/paper_v0_7.md docs/spec_v0_4.md docs/minimal_data_contract_v0_1.md \
  --task "Audit RCGov's own docs for drift" --out out
ls out/   # CLEAN_CONTEXT_PACK.md, NON_INJECTION_REPORT.md, CONFLICT_MAP.md, …

The dogfooding run quarantines the one section of the spec that lists prompt- injection example phrases (§6.2) — RCGov declines to inject its own injection examples — and confirms the code enums are in sync with the contract document.

Streamlit MVP

A local UI over the same pipeline (spec §14). Upload files, describe the task, optionally attach a commitment manifest, and read the artifacts in-page:

pip install -e ".[ui]"
PYTHONPATH=src streamlit run app/streamlit_app.py

The app logic lives in the streamlit-free rcgov.service layer and is covered by unit tests; the app itself is smoke-tested with Streamlit's AppTest harness.

Authority commitment

A proposed authority label never binds on its own (contract §5 rule 1). In an unattended run, a segment proposed canonical but uncommitted is foregrounded for review rather than injected — so the clean pack stays empty of canonical material until a baseline is committed. That commitment is the user's "smallest anchor set" (Authority Stabilization Mode, spec §11), declared in a small manifest:

# config/commitments.yaml
commitments:
  - source_match: "minimal_data_contract"   # this doc is the binding baseline
    authority: canonical
    commitment_source: repository_manifest
  - heading_match: "License"
    authority: canonical
    commitment_source: signed_policy

Committed segments satisfy the Authority Commitment Gate and flow into the pack's Active Canonical / Committed Context, tagged with their commitment source. When canonical material is proposed but nothing is committed, the manifest surfaces an Authority Stabilization recommendation instead of silently injecting or silently dropping it.

Design decisions

See docs/DECISION_RECORD.md for the locked choices (MMV boundary, licensing, contract freeze, detection policy).

Relationship to MOBIUS MMV

RCGov is a clean-room sibling of MOBIUS MMV, sharing only the Mobius answer-entitlement philosophy. It carries no MMV code dependency. The only borrowed asset is a seed list of prompt-injection patterns (config/injection_seeds.yaml), authored by the same rights holder.

License

• Source code (src/, app/, tests/, config/, build files): AGPL-3.0-or-later — see LICENSE.
• Paper / specification text (docs/): CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — see docs/LICENSE-CC-BY-NC-SA.txt.

Rights holder: MOBIUS.LLC / Taiko Toeda.