Guides

Short, practical how-tos for real tasks. Each one is copy-pasteable end to end. New to the tool? Start with the getting-started tour; come here when you have a specific job to do.

Author

Set a goal contract

State the goal as a contract — accomplish these things (typed acceptance criteria over your code), subject to these policies (the rigor bar). Then read back met / governed / certified.

Author

Capture & curate a trace

You just finished an agent session — turn it into a clean, honest reasoning record: emit, curate the narrative, declare the gaps.

Reviewer

Review an AI-generated PR

Someone handed you an AI-written PR. Confirm the goal was met and governed, then certify the criteria were the right ones — the certified axis is the reviewer's job.

Maintainer

Add ponens to CI / your PRs

Wire up the GitHub Action so every PR reads back met / governed / certified, with the governed axis as a blocking PASS/FAIL gate and a one-click viewer.

Maintainer

Govern a repo with policies

Own the governed axis: pull best-practice policies from the gallery, scope them to goals, block by default (disable or waive on the record), and write your own rules in LTLf.

Integrator

Use ponens programmatically

Drive the policy checker from your own tool: machine-readable JSON output, the Python evaluator API, and a live per-change compliance loop.

Integrator

Import from your observability stack

Turn your existing OpenTelemetry or Langfuse agent traces into ponens traces — spans/observations → actions + lineage — then check them against policies.