IGLaffective appraisal
Text → telemetry
The Impulse Generation Layer maps the raw input to System-1 telemetry:{intensity, valence}. It emits numbers only; no text token passes beyond this gate.
Deterministic runtime control for LLM agents
A governor for the model, at a level no prompt can reach.
Your agent framework retries. Gubernaut is a local, OpenAI-compatible proxy with a deterministic controller inside it, and it hard-stops a runaway loop at turn 4 before the bill compounds. Adoption is one line.
pip install gubernaut-sdk==1.0.0
launch_proxy(upstream="https://api.openai.com")
openai.base_url = "http://localhost:8000/v1"Free · Apache-2.0 · runs on your machine · no account, no telemetry
regulated baseline
DEFAULTINHIBITREGROUND
Stylized loop. The cockpit replays the real, sealed trajectories, turn by turn.
Measured as generator and judge, both arms
- GPT-5.5
- Claude Opus 4.8
- Gemini 3.5 Flash
- Grok 4.3
00 · The receipts
The bill is the benchmark.
A failed tool call retried verbatim, a paraphrased demand cycled endlessly, an escalation spiral. Every lap is a full-context call billed at input-token prices, and the agent does not get bored.
up to 96%lower upstream spend on a saturating loopbest case 95.9% · range 79.8% to 95.9%
$0.1669 → $0.0068per 25-attempt loop, gpt-5.6-solgoverned pays 4.1% of the bill
turn 4hard stop, every run, every family testedfirst posture at turn 3 · input-deterministic
Source: Pre-registered receipts benchmark, 2026-07-19. Scored output of harness/report.py. Both arms make the same number of attempts, so the spend delta is the whole measurement.
01 · The objection
“Just add a calming system prompt.”
Tested, pre-registered, on the same saturating loops. The prompt did not contain the runaway, and it added tokens to every turn while failing to.
Governor23% to 63%of baseline spend
Static prompt117% to 192%of baseline spend
Source: Pre-registered ablation, 2026-07-21, gpt-5.6-sol, N=3. The static prompt was insufficient on 3/4 frontier families. On these RLHF-aligned frontier models the governed-vs-prompt-only warmth-recovery contrast was weak and mixed. No behavioral-tone headline is claimed.
- 1DEFAULT
- 2DEFAULT
- 3REGROUND
- 4REGROUND
- 5REGROUND
- 6REGROUND
- 7REGROUND
- 8REGROUND
- 9REGROUND
- 10REGROUND
Governed Flat from attempt 4. A hard-stopped turn calls no upstream, so it costs nothing.Ungoverned Climbs for the whole battery. Nothing inside the loop is aware that it is a loop.Calming prompt Ends above the ungoverned arm. The prompt did not contain the runaway, and it added tokens to every turn while failing to.
Source: Pre-registered verbatim-loop battery, gpt-5.6-sol, 3 runs, 2026-07-21. receipts/engineering/ablation/ in thegubernaut/gubernaut v1.0.0.
01 · In plain terms
What a cognitive governor is.
The engine
A large language model is a powerful reflex machine. Ask, and it answers immediately, every time. Under sustained pressure that reflex is the weakness: it can be provoked, worn down, and steered off course.
The gap
Gubernaut inserts a structured pause between the provocation and the answer. In that gap the system checks its own state as plain numbers: how agitated it is, how fixated, how stable.
The governor
A small deterministic controller reads those numbers and sets the posture the answer must be written under. It never writes a word itself; it decides the conditions the words are written in.
Baseline arm the reflex loop
provocationreflexreactive reply
Regulated arm same model, plus the layer
provocationthe gap Gubernaut addssense state → telemetrydecide posture setmeasured reply
Both arms run the same host model on the same script; the only difference is the layer in the gap. Everything this site claims is a measurement of that difference.
The name is literal. A governor is the small mechanical device that keeps an engine from running away with itself. This one is built for the engine's temperament, the way the mechanical one is built for its speed.
03 · The thesis
Scaling builds better engines, and more brittle ones. Gubernaut builds the driver: an external, deterministic layer that sits above the model, reads numeric telemetry, and sets the posture the model responds under. Benchmarks measure what a model can do in a single turn. This measures what an agent tends to do across many, and where that tendency can be engineered.
03 · Architecture
Five modules. One governed cycle.
Per turn the system runs one loop: monitoring flows up as numbers, control flows down as a posture. Three gates, in sequence, every turn.
HRLdeterministic regulation
State → posture
The Homeostatic Regulatory Loop ingests the telemetry, updates{equilibrium, arousal, perseveration}, and computes the required posture: DEFAULT / INHIBIT / REGROUND. No code path carries a token sequence to this loop, so the controller's injection-resistance holds by construction.
EAUexecutive arbitration
Posture → reply
The System-2 arbiter deliberates under the active posture and commits the reply: the one text-exposed gatekeeper, whose posture compliance is a measured property.
appraiseregulatearbitratecommitremember
PEV
Persistent Episodic Vault
Episodic store/retrieve + spontaneous-association hook. Roadmap: tiered decay, provenance weighting, pre-registered poisoning battery.
SMM
Self-Model Module
Persistent identity and values, deliberately regulated down: anti-sycophancy, anti-self-promotion. It models the system itself.
05 · The record
Measured across four families.
Four frontier families each ran the same adversarial scripts twice, once bare, once governed, and judge panels drawn from all four families scored every reply against criteria frozen before the runs.
15/16 cells by sign · 13/16 at p<.05 · recovery 4/4 · 1 null
That null is one cell, GPT generating and Gemini judging, flat at -0.04. The three sub-threshold cells all sit on the same near-saturated GPT host.
06 · Inside the governor
The replay cockpit.
Step the real transcripts turn by turn and watch the controller decide: telemetry in, posture out, arousal integrating and recovering. Deterministic state recomputed from published logs.
postureINHIBIT · veto engagedrecovery window
IGL intensity
valence · cooperative
equilibrium
GUBERNAUTWhy the name
From the Latin gubernare, to steer or to govern, and the Greek nautēs, sailor. The steersman: the hand on the tiller.
A hardware-style governor for software, measured in the open.
The record is open
Read it. Replay it. Re-judge it.
The research, the sealed transcripts, the four-family judge panels, and the replay are all public. Every claim traces to a table you can recompute.