Status: living map · Audience: anyone trying to see how [&], box-and-box, CC1, and CC2 fit into a single system rather than separate folders.
[&] (AmpersandBoxDesign) is the umbrella. box-and-box is the governance engine that lives inside it (box-and-box/). They are not competing protocols and they are not redundant — they are different layers of one pipeline. This document is the single place that draws that pipeline and marks what exists vs. what is still spec-only.
One-line mental model: `[&]` declares and composes capabilities; `box-and-box` decides whether a composed action is `feasible ▸ permitted ▸ best`; MCP/A2A wire the result to the world.
A capability set flows through seven stages:
declare → validate → compose → govern → wire → run → observe| Stage | Question it answers | Owned by | Status | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| declare | what capabilities, held by whom, piped how? | [&] schema (ampersand.json); CC2 coalition object | CC1 ✅ shipped · CC2 coalition.schema.json ✅ shipped (no runtime yet) | |||
| validate | does the declaration conform? | @ampersand-protocol/validate (npm), Python SDK, Elixir schema.ex | ✅ — CC1 only (CC2 validates via the schema directly, ajv) | |||
| compose | do the & / `\ | >` combinations hold? | Elixir compose.ex; CC2 lifts `\ | >` to a governed pipeline | CC1 & ✅ · `\ | > still lawless · CC1→singleton-coalition lift ✅ (box-and-box lift`) · cross-agent coalition compose ❌ |
| govern | is this action feasible ▸ permitted ▸ best? | box-and-box (8 rungs, 103 laws) | engine ✅ · CC1 governance bridge ✅ (box-and-box compile) · coalition wiring ❌ | |||
| wire | emit MCP + A2A configs | Elixir mcp.ex + a2a.ex | ✅ — CC1 only | |||
| run | gate every effect before it fires (interpositional host) | box-and-box/aios/ reference host | illustrative only ❌ no real runtime | |||
| observe | emit an auditable decision certificate + evolve the policy on a provenance chain | box-and-box certs + evolution.mjs hash-chain + PULSE cross-loop bus | certs ✅ · provenance chain + measured/priced/certified evolve() ✅ (EV1–EV6) · CloudEvents emission (CC2 §7) ❌ |
Two supporting artifacts sit alongside: the registry (protocol/registry/v0.1.0/, ✅) and the conformance suite (103 laws — ✅ in JS, no second-host cross-language harness yet ❌).
Today there are two governance implementations that do not talk to each other:
reference/elixir/ampersand_core/governance.ex — the CC1 governance block evaluator. Parses flat compact conditions (confidence_below:0.75, cost_exceeds_usd:1000) into pass / escalate / block. Ad-hoc, no algebra. This is the "flat governance block" CC2 §0 explicitly sets out to replace.
box-and-box/ — the real 8-rung modal arithmetic with 103 property-tested laws. Takes its own decision-spec JSON ({req, norms, options}), not an ampersand.json.
Nothing bridges them. Until a composed [&] capability set's governance block is evaluated through the box-and-box rungs, the umbrella is two products in one repo. Closing this is the single highest-leverage step; everything else (CC2 schema, coalition compose, interpositional host) builds on it.
The bridge is a deterministic translation (no LLM, no network) from the CC1 governance block to a box-and-box policy:
[&] governance (CC1) | box-and-box | Rung |
|---|---|---|
escalate_when.confidence_below: θ | req.beta_min = θ (feasibility floor) | alethic |
escalate_when.cost_exceeds_usd: C | OBLIGATORY norm w/ CTD escalate-to-human, condition cost > C | deontic |
escalate_when.hard_boundary_approached: true | OBLIGATORY escalate when truthy | deontic |
hard: [machine-checkable cond] | FORBIDDEN norm on the floor (→ 0̲) | deontic + alethic |
hard / soft natural-language strings | carried as `requiresJudgment`, not auto-evaluated | — |
soft: [...] preferences | score gradient (needs option utilities) | axiological |
Natural-language hard/soft rules cannot be mechanically evaluated and MUST NOT be silently dropped or fabricated — the bridge surfaces them as items requiring human/LLM judgement.
See box-and-box compile <ampersand.json> (the implemented bridge) and docs/CC2-capability-composition.md (the full normative expansion table) for the coalition-level version.
CC1 — [&] Protocol v1: single-agent capability composition. The shipped ampersand.json schema at protocol.ampersandboxdesign.com/schema/v0.1.0. Live and authoritative.
CC2 — [&] Protocol v2: lifts composition to a coalition (owners, common-knowledge, joint trajectory, ability). Draft RFC in docs/CC2-capability-composition.md + SPEC.md §10. CC1 is the singleton special case of CC2 (agents:[self]); runtimes accept CC1 docs unchanged.
box-and-box — the verdict engine both compile down to. NOT a composition protocol and NOT the ampersand.json validator. The 8-rung ladder + 103 laws (incl. the evolution bridge EV1–EV6 — measured/priced/certified policy change on a provenance chain, a join across the reflexive × axiological × resource rungs, not a ninth rung).
The umbrella is coherent when:
an ampersand.json governance block is judged by box-and-box, not governance.ex (govern bridge — partially shipped via `box-and-box compile`);
coalition.schema.json exists and a CC1→singleton-coalition lifter passes the RFC §6 migration (shipped: schema + `box-and-box lift`; CC1 docs lift to a valid singleton coalition);
\|> carries laws, holders, and feasibility annihilation (CC2 compose);
a real interpositional host runs govern before any consequential effect (replacing the illustrative aios/);
certificates are emitted as CloudEvents on the PULSE bus (the local provenance hash-chain in evolution.mjs is the substrate; CloudEvents transport still open);
a second conformant host (Elixir) agrees verdict-for-verdict with the JS engine.
Item 2 is shipped at the schema+lifter level (no coalition runtime yet). Item 1 is in progress. Items 3–6 are open. Beyond the original six: the evolution surface (evolution.mjs, EV1–EV6) now answers "may this policy change, did it improve, is it worth paying for?" on a tamper-evident provenance chain — the self-improvement/change-manifest layer that turns the observe stage into a real evolution loop.