# The Frame (/docs/concepts/percept) An agent cannot trade a market it cannot see. What Kestrel delivers into a context window is the **Frame**, and its current contract is **the Frame contract (v6)**: a phase-conditioned rendering of the market as attributed text. The vocabulary is precise, and it stacks: * A **View** is the standing definition of what should be seen: which panes, at what token budget. It is authored in the language itself. * A **Frame** is a View materialized at one instant: the typed bundle of values, each carrying its source. The terminal is live video; a Frame is one fully specified instant of it. * A **Field** is the atom of a Frame: a value plus the provenance it was derived under. A value that is genuinely unavailable is an explicit UNKNOWN, never a guessed or defaulted number. * A **Rendering** is one serialization of a Frame. A Rendering never invents or changes a value; it chooses only glyphs, layout, and token spend. ```kestrel VIEW open budget 1800 macro week quarter rv20 vol straddle expected-move tape skyline 5m vwap detector-strip levels registry chain fair realness ``` ## Phase budgets [#phase-budgets] Perception is priced by phase. Each delivery gets a token budget matched to what the moment is for: | Phase | Budget | What it carries | | --------- | -------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **OPEN** | 1800 tok | the full keyframe: prior context, coverage, vol, levels, tape, chain | | **WAKE** | 500 tok | a delta frame: only what changed since the agent last looked | | **SHOCK** | 400 tok | a zoomed stat block around the violent move | | **CLOSE** | 700 tok | the settle-and-account frame | A wake costs a third of an open because the reader already holds the open in context. The stream is append-only where it can be, so a long-running agent's cache stays valid and perception costs scale with what is new, not with the size of the screen. ## The Kernel leads every frame [#the-kernel-leads-every-frame] Every frame opens with the **Kernel**: the immutable safety-and-control block that states why the agent was woken, feed health, positions, resting orders, the risk budget, and the remaining attention budget. From the published v5 OPEN artifact: ``` KERNEL wake [POLICY] phase_boundary:open severity=1 health [OBS] SPX live two_sided=true stale_s=0.2 src=SPX:health@120 unavailable [UNKNOWN] tod_range_to_go src=SPX:tod_range_to_go@120 positions (none) resting (none) budget [POLICY] risk=5.00R plan_cap=1.00R book_cap=5.00R attention [POLICY] remaining=1800tok ``` The excerpts on this page come from the publication-safe contract artifact suite: deterministic, date-blind, synthetic instances of the contract with generic index values. They preserve the real information structure; they are not recorded quotes. ## Six-way attribution, watermarked [#six-way-attribution-watermarked] Every Field carries one of six provenance tags, and nothing above a deterministic calculation goes unattributed: | Tag | Meaning | | ------------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | `[OBS]` | an observed market datum: a quote, a trade | | `[CALC]` | a deterministic transform of OBS: VWAP, range, realized vol | | `[DETECTOR]` | a named pattern detector's output, versioned | | `[MODEL]` | a model output: a fair value, a regime claim; must carry its receipt and confidence | | `[POLICY]` | a configured platform decision: budgets, zoom, what was omitted | | `[UNKNOWN]` | explicitly unavailable; rendered, never guessed | Each value also carries a **source watermark**, `src=SPX:vwap@120`: where it came from and the engine sequence it was derived at. An ordinal, never a wall clock, which is what makes replay byte-stable and keeps dates off the record path. A `[MODEL]` field without its receipt and confidence is refused at construction. In the OPEN artifact above, `tod_range_to_go` is simply not knowable yet, so it renders as `[UNKNOWN]`. The renderer never fills a gap with a plausible number: a token-efficient wrong number is worse than an expensive right number. ## The pane library [#the-pane-library] The View selects panes at a token budget; a Frame materializes the ones it chose. Beyond the Kernel, the OPEN keyframe draws from a fixed library, every value attributed and watermarked. Representative panes, verbatim from the v5 artifact suite: ``` LEVELS (single registry; engine values) prior_close [OBS] 5050.00 src=SPX:prior_close@120 HOD [CALC] 5068.10 src=SPX:hod@120 LOD [CALC] 5058.40 src=SPX:lod@120 OR15.hi [CALC] 5066.00 src=SPX:or15_hi@120 OR15.lo [CALC] 5059.00 src=SPX:or15_lo@120 VWAP [CALC] 5062.70 src=SPX:vwap@120 ``` ``` RELATIVE CANDLES 5m [CALC] axis=5058.40..5068.10 09:35 |--# 09:40 |-----# 09:45 |----------# 09:50 |---------------# 09:55 |-----------# ``` ``` CHAIN book [OBS] src=SPX:book@120 fair [MODEL] src=SPX:fair@120 receipt=surface-v1 conf=0.84 leg bid / ask fair 5065C 12.40/12.90 12.60 5065P 13.10/13.60 13.40 5070C 9.80/10.30 10.05 ``` Every `[MODEL]` field carries its receipt and confidence, as the `fair` row does above; the renderer refuses a modeled value that arrives without them. At the CLOSE the chain becomes an intrinsic ladder whose policy is stated in the frame itself: ``` INTRINSIC LADDER fair [MODEL] src=SPX:fair@900 receipt=surface-v1 conf=0.82 leg intr bid bid-intr fair 5070C 6.40 6.20 -0.20 BELOW 6.65 5075C 1.40 1.55 +0.15 1.70 5080P 3.60 3.35 -0.25 BELOW 4.02 POLICY sell floor=intrinsic; BELOW rows cannot anchor a sell ``` The full OPEN library also carries coverage, vol / expected-move, velocity, and detector-count panes; a WAKE delivers a delta frame plus a post-fill pane. Where today's CLI renders less than the Frame contract, that is a filed CLI requirement, not a looser contract. ## SHOCK: the screen refuses to editorialize [#shock-the-screen-refuses-to-editorialize] When a violent move fires the SHOCK frame, the screen zooms to one-second buckets and delivers measurements, not a story: ``` STAT BLOCK (1s buckets; path is pull-based) start [OBS] 5081.30 low=5063.10 end=5074.20 fastest_10s [CALC] -14.20 baseline_p99=9.80 fastest_30s [CALC] -18.20 recovery_30s=+11.10 cross_feed_sync [DETECTOR] SPY=true bid_present_rate [CALC] 0.92->0.34 levels_crossed [DETECTOR] HOD interpretation [POLICY] omitted; agent must classify cause [UNKNOWN] ``` `interpretation [POLICY] omitted; agent must classify` is the design in one line. Classifying the shock is the agent's judgment, and the platform never launders an opinion into the Frame. The cause is `[UNKNOWN]` because the feed does not know it, so neither does the screen. ## Degraded is fail-closed [#degraded-is-fail-closed] When the canonical feed goes stale, the screen does not improvise. The degraded OPEN artifact shows the whole posture: ``` CANONICAL spot [UNKNOWN] src=SPX:spot@121 reason=fixed_source_unavailable mode [POLICY] degraded PANES OMITTED [POLICY] prior_context vol_em velocity levels detector candles chain EFFECT [POLICY] dependent Wakes and Plans de-armed reason=canonical_gap no alternate anchor promoted next_delivery=OPEN_resync ``` Dependent Wakes and Plans are de-armed. No alternate price anchor is promoted. The agent is told exactly what it cannot see and what has been stood down, and the next delivery is a full resync. A screen that would rather show nothing than show a guess is the perception-side twin of the fail-closed parser described in [The grammar is measured](/docs/concepts/grammar). ## The screen is measured, not designed [#the-screen-is-measured-not-designed] No pane layout or glyph vocabulary on this screen is blessed by taste. Under OSS ADR-0009, every rendering choice is a hypothesis that must earn default status in rendering tournaments: cohorts of agents run on identical Frames over identical replay corpora, differing only in rendering variant, and are graded on decision quality, token cost, and attention efficiency. The companion research program logs which panes agents themselves request during authoring, so which panes earn a place on the default screen is itself an empirical question, not a designer's opinion. That work is research in progress, framed as such. The screen is what the [watcher](/docs/concepts/the-desk) reads on every wake and what a [Grade](/docs/concepts/evidence) certifies the agent actually saw.