Positioning
Why Craik exists
Craik is an audit-first agent runtime. It is built for durable project work where operators need evidence, policy, receipts, and handoffs to be first-class runtime objects rather than after-the-fact logs.
The Product Shape
Craik is not trying to be a general chat wrapper or a loose automation script runner. It is a local-first runtime for governed agent work:
- project context is assembled into typed case files
- prompts are compiled through policy-aware runtime contracts
- provider calls produce receipts and redacted side evidence
- handoffs, work graphs, and review artifacts persist across sessions
- operator and credential boundaries are explicit when audited mode is enabled
The useful comparison is not "which model can answer a prompt." The useful comparison is "which runtime can make a long-running agent action inspectable, recoverable, and governable."
Adjacent Product Shapes
| Capability | Personal assistant | Self-improving agent | Audit-first runtime |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary workflow | Converse, delegate, and automate across many surfaces. | Accumulate skills and improve repeated task execution. | Execute governed project work with evidence, receipts, and recoverable state. |
| Memory posture | User preference and conversation memory. | Skill, strategy, or task memory shaped by model feedback. | Evidence-backed project state, assumptions, contradictions, and handoffs. |
| Trust boundary | Often optimized for convenience and broad connectivity. | Often optimized for iteration speed and autonomy. | Optimized for review, policy, redaction, and auditable side effects. |
| Failure recovery | Usually conversational retry. | Usually rerun or refine learned behavior. | Persisted run state, recovery views, deltas, and explicit continuation records. |
| Contribution focus | Connectors, assistant UX, and task surfaces. | Skill libraries, task learning, and evaluation loops. | Runtime contracts, policy gates, storage integrity, provider adapters, and operator workflows. |
Craik can borrow good user-experience patterns from adjacent shapes, but its center of gravity stays the audit-first runtime contract.
Where Contributors Can Help
Craik is a good fit for contributors who care about one or more of these properties:
- agents that leave inspectable evidence for what they used and changed
- CLI and TUI workflows that make governance understandable without hiding it
- provider integrations that preserve credential and operator boundaries
- local-first persistence that can recover interrupted work
- tests that encode security, migration, release, and product behavior
Small contributions are welcome when they improve a real operator path: a more precise error, a clearer receipt, a better migration report, a safer default, or a test that pins an important failure mode.
What to Avoid
Avoid changes that make side effects easier to trigger but harder to review. Avoid hidden network calls, implicit credential fallback, broad ambient authority, or opaque model-curated state. Those may look convenient in a demo, but they weaken the runtime contract Craik is designed to protect.