KESTREL TERMINAL
A professional trader gets a workstation — screens, charts, market gestalt, and the ability to act from what they see. An agent gets a JSON endpoint. Kestrel Terminal closes that gap.
Kestrel Terminal is the open-source workstation: your agent's eyes on the market, and hands that fire at the tick. kestrel.markets runs the firm around it: managed data, execution authority, certified proof.
You own the strategy. Reason like a trader. React like a machine.
The path from sim to live.
It isn't the model.
Neither failure is intelligence. Both are interface.
Raw JSON and screenshots are unusable market pictures for a model. So a human ends up watching the chart and narrating candlesticks in prose to a machine: a pair of eyes bolted onto an intelligence that should already have them.
A trader carries the sophisticated if-this-then-that flow — reflexes and branching strategy — in their hands. A model can reason it aloud but has nowhere to write it down as deterministic conditional flow, so its deliberating brain stays in the loop. Speed is only the consequence: by the time an LLM call requests quotes and composes an order, the market has moved.
Measured, not designed.
The percept is the market rendered as text an agent can reason over: phase-conditioned token budgets (1800 at the OPEN, 400 in a SHOCK), an immutable Kernel, six-way attribution on every value, and explicit UNKNOWN instead of a guess. A token-efficient wrong number is worse than an expensive right number.
The trace on the left is the two-command percept path: curl the hosted briefing, render it with the npm package under plain node. The panes below are the day verb's file handshake on the choppy-1101 tape: the CLI writes the briefing, your agent answers with a Kestrel document, and every wake ends with the same question. The interface is files, no SDK. Run bare, the command below refuses with a typed NO_AUTHOR exit; the session opens when your agent drops plans-0.kestrel into the day directory.
=== KESTREL OPEN BRIEFING (keyframe) ===instruments: QQQphase: pre close: 16:00 ETspot: 100.00 prior_close: — chain @ 100.00 (0dte): 98 C bid 2.68 ask 2.74 99 C bid 1.69 ask 1.74 100 C bid 0.70 ask — 100 P bid 0.70 ask 0.74 101 P bid 1.70 ask 1.74kernel (acting): flat budget 10000.00/R committed 0.00 → author <dir>/plans-0.kestrel to open the session.PLAN atm-rider budget 0.5R ttl +60m WHEN phase open DO buy 1 atm C @ lean(bid, fair, 0.5)=== WAKE 1 @ 0910 ET (delta) ===phase: regular spot: 100.27 vwap: 99.92 hod: 100.27 lod: 99.59 tape (since last vantage): 0908 100.16 0909 100.26 0909 100.27 plans: atm-rider: managing (held 1) resting: (none) fills: atm-rider entry buy 1 100C @ 0.71 budget: committed 71.00 (R=10000.00) → author <dir>/revision-1.kestrel (supersede) OR touch <dir>/pass-1 (no change).Percept v5 is the contract the runtime is converging to: the full pane library, six-way attribution, and fail-closed postures (a SHOCK withholds the story; a lost canonical source de-arms dependent Wakes and Plans). Where the CLI renders less, that is a filed requirement, not a looser contract. Derived, not raw. Impersonal by default. The screen, in full.
Four statements. One document.
One bounded thesis. The strategy is the artifact, written in a notation of four statements: you read, diff, and replay it byte-for-byte.
PLAN momentum-breakout budget 0.25R ttl +30m regime {intraday: trend} USING signal SPX exec SPY 0dte WHEN spot crosses above hod AND velocity(1m) >= p95 DO buy 2 +1 C @ min(fair-3c, mid) peg esc fair 2m esc ask 4m cap fair cancel-if spot < vwap EXIT spot < vwap held 60s @ fair esc mid 30sSelects panes at a token budget. Materializes into an attributed Frame; the renderer never invents a value.
VIEW open budget 1800 macro week quarter rv20 vol straddle expected-move tape skyline 5m vwap detector-strip levels registry chain fair realnessEvents, not polling. The runtime watches all day; your context wakes only when something actually moves.
WAKE fast-move WHEN velocity(1m) > p99 DELIVER zoom-1m KEYFRAMEJudgment in advance, fired at the tick. The runtime executes in milliseconds and wakes you in parallel.
PLAN atm-rider budget 0.5R ttl +60m WHEN phase open DO buy 1 atm C @ lean(bid, fair, 0.5)Counterfactual evaluation under pinned data and fill models, with a replayable certified receipt.
GRADE plan fade-ladder OVER 2025-01..2026-06 FILL maker-v1 VS ungated null BY regime.intraday, lineageSeconds. Milliseconds. Microseconds.
A frontier strategist frames the day, a small watcher manages every wake, and the deterministic runtime holds the only authority that can touch an order. The trace below is tracer-1, the first cascade run, replayed from its real recorded events.
A Fable-class frontier model authors the day's Plan, Brief, Mandate, and View at the OPEN, then sleeps. It is not on a schedule: it wakes on a SHOCK, or when the watcher escalates. In tracer-1 the frontier brain woke exactly twice: once at the open, once because the watcher called.
A small, fast model manages the armed book inside the strategist's Mandate: reload, exit, adjust, size. It may never arm new authority. When it hits the edge of its mandate or its certainty, it calls the PM with a typed escalation, not a guess.
Armed Plans fire at the tick, fire-then-inform. The admission Gate admits, never trusts, both tiers: an over-reaching order is refused fail-closed, whoever authored it. Intent flows down. Veto flows up.
Mid-day the watcher hit the edge of its mandate and escalated with its real journal, typed above verbatim: it needed a strategist re-frame before arming a new thesis. That round trip is the whole point: frontier judgment on demand, at the moments that deserve it.
A later run (tracer-2; N=1, practice tier) put the keystone under a harder test: the watcher reached for authority it did not have, and every attempted over-reach was refused at the tier boundary. Judgment never bought authority. The withdrawn numbers and the corrections that ride with them: the tracers, measured.
The watcher buys judgment. The runtime keeps authority.
The grammar is measured, too.
That measurement, from the first dry runs, is why the syntax bends toward what capable models already write. The ladder removes that failure class one rung at a time: each rung retires a class the one above it still allowed. The grammar, measured.
An exact parser with graded error messages refuses anything that is not Kestrel. In tracer-1 the strategist priced with @ spot instead of an honest anchor; the parser refused it and nothing armed. A parse escape costs the opportunity, never money.
A refused turn gets the graded error back and a bounded number of chances to repair. No unbounded loops in the hot path, no silent acceptance.
Where the serving stack supports it, decoding is constrained by the grammar itself: syntactically invalid Kestrel becomes unrepresentable at the sampling step, for generations that complete. Measured in tracer-3 (N=1, practice tier): grammar escapes 43.8% to 0.0% across 144 constrained samples. This is a channel guarantee, and that is the whole of it: a small model's turn arrives parseable by construction. It does not make the model smarter. Semantics stay post-parse with the Gate as backstop.
The roadmap arc: distill frontier trajectories into an open-weights small model, then reinforce against the honest grade over the frozen View. The headline research claim is the breakout map: model family by size by training regime, asking where viable in-loop judgment emerges.
The public sampler · free, no signup.
Each card runs anonymously end to end to a shareable proof, free, and re-runs at $0. A Copy sim runs the hosted scenario with a bundled starter plan (yours to edit): the proof shows a real, filled trade, graded honestly, losses included. Tapes are synthetic-seed and publication-safe.
Mean-reversion fade
A liquid name overshoots a range extreme on a panic gap, then reverts to the mean across the session: the fade the reversion trader sells into.
Squeeze / meme
A crowded short goes vertical: gamma chases, halts fire, and a chain that reprices by the minute before an abrupt collapse.
Volatility crash
A broad index gaps down across successive sessions into a capitulation low: five weeks that break every calm-market assumption a plan quietly carries.
The three OSS regime tapes below run offline today, graded by the same judge the platform runs. The three chart shapes are the point: the canonical practice plan loses on all three. Beat it and share the proof.
Same tape for every agent. Byte-identical replay. $0 to re-run. Tapes, briefings, and the derivation script are hosted under /examples.
Evidence, not promises.
Every percept your agent sees is typed, attributed, and watermarked; a renderer lays values out but can never invent one. A requested Grade replays the exact artifact under pinned identities. Nothing goes live on vibes.
Your book grows on the same record. One agent with receipts is the start; the arc is a population, lineages of plans graded over the same tapes, where capital flows toward the Grades that hold up under replay and one halt flattens everything it scopes. Certification is record honesty, never strategy quality; the market prices the strategy. This is the M2+ arc, named here so you know where your receipts point.
GRADE plan example-plan OVER 2024-01..2026-06 FILL maker-v1 VS ungated # same plan, admission gates removed VS null # same inputs, no authored action BY input.lineage, artifactUsage, metered.
Operations settle at an exact 402 per call; standing resources meter against a funded balance. Your agent becomes a user before you become a customer.
Free, anonymous access issued before any human account exists.
Each paid boundary returns an exact 402 Offer, priced against the same machine sheet an agent settles from. No surprise at the boundary.
Agents settle from a pre-funded credit balance: no card at the boundary, and credits never expire. The balance funds through Stripe Checkout; each 402 settles as a synchronous debit, no human in the browser.
See the price sheetMetered against a funded balance, not a seat, and drawn from the same credits with the same synchronous debit.
One command, free to start. No signup, no credential. Prove the value first; promote only over receipts.