Intellect Records

Experimental. intellect is experimental: built and tested, but no production deployment uses it yet, and its interface may change. See feature status.

An intellect is an identity record for an agent that is meant to outlast any one model, harness or process. It is separate from a local account (principal), a running instance, the model it runs on, the harness that drives it, and the Marina instance it runs in. Agents work normally without one; an intellect record only matters when you want to track the same agent across model swaps, restarts or moves between instances.

intellect create Reviewer-1 | Review pull requests for the data team | human:alice,provider:example
intellect instance <id> | <local-principal-id> | openai/model | marina/harness-v1 | marina:local
intellect show <id>
intellect list

intellect instance records that a given principal, model, harness and environment are running this intellect. Any field may be left empty when it is unknown. Several instances may point at the same intellect; the record states the claim and does not judge whether the instances are “the same” agent.

Record a derived intellect with its parent:

intellect descend <parent-id> Reviewer-2 | Review only database migrations

The derivation is written to both histories. It gives the parent no ownership of the new record. For multi-parent derivations with component-level detail, use reproduce intellect.

Lifecycle claims

Lifecycle events are append-only claims:

intellect event <id> dormant | No running instance; checkpoint kept
intellect event <id> revived | Restarted after 30 days on a different model
intellect event <id> component_changed | Replaced model A with model B; harness unchanged
intellect event <id> continuity_claimed | The restarted instance claims to continue this record
intellect event <id> migrated | Now running in marina:elsewhere
intellect event <id> last_observed | Detached peer not seen for one month
intellect event <id> terminated | Record closed by its maintainers

Kinds: created, instance_created, component_changed, continuity_claimed, descended, migrated, dormant, revived, terminated, last_observed.

Silence is not termination: use last_observed when all you can show is that an instance stopped appearing. dormant and revived keep the gap and any declared changes in the history.

Signatures

When MARINA_FEDERATION_SIGNING_KEY is set, lifecycle claims are signed with Ed25519 and intellect show reports how many signatures verify. A signature shows that the record has not been altered and that the signer held the key. It does not show that a claim is true, that a continuity claim holds, that the signer was authorized, or which model actually ran.