Views

A View decides what an agent sees when the runtime wakes it; the agent decides what to do with it. A Kestrel pod is not one agent but a small organization of seats — roles distinguished by the deliberation budget they can afford — and each seat reads a different screen because each seat does a different job at a different speed.

This section is the library of those screens. It is organized on two axes, the same two the engine's own template-cell key turns on:

• By seat / role — one page per View, each explaining its layout in terms of the seat's task and timescale: the Strategist View, the Watcher View, the Scanner View, and the PM View.
• By market variant — instrument class, timescale, and strategy archetype. The Views you see today are the equity-index options variant; the same View grammar carries the other instrument classes, described under The variant axis below.

What a View is

A seat's screen is not a monolith. It is assembled through four layers, each answering a different question, each authored on its own:

1. Seat — who is this? A role in the pod org, fixed by its affordable deliberation budget: a PM and a Strategist are slow, deliberate, frontier-class judgment (dollars, a few times a day); a Watcher is the fast reflex (pennies, seconds); a Trigger is a non-LLM reflex below even the Watcher. Seats' latency envelopes differ by orders of magnitude, which is why no single model fills them all well.
2. Tasks — what must it decide? The seat's job: allocate an envelope, author a leaf, manage held inventory, summon a bigger brain. The tasks fix what information is decision-relevant.
3. View config — what does it see? The role-keyed View — the panes, in order, at the band the wake zooms to. This is the layer this section is about. Perception is tuned here.
4. Persona / Brief — how does it lean? The soft, directional English the seat reasons from (a "disciplined risk manager," a "momentum chaser"). Personas tune policy; Views tune perception — different channels, both role-attachable, and the Brief never enters admission (it directs, it never authorizes).

The seat and its persona are policy; the View is perception. This section fixes layer 3 and leaves layers 1, 2, and 4 to their own documents.

The pod

                     ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
   humans sit        │  humans — above the root, always             │
   above the root    └───────────────────────┬─────────────────────┘
                                              │
   ╔══════════════════════════════════════════╪══════════════════════════════════════════╗
   ║  L0 · RISK  (a LAYER, not a seat)         │   clamps / vetoes · may never open risk    ║
   ║  outranks every node including the PM     │   rendered surface: the kernel safety block ║
   ╚══════════════════════════════════════════╪══════════════════════════════════════════╝
                                              │
                       ┌──────────────────────┴──────────────────────┐
                       │  PM node  (runs a Pod: allocates + discovers)│
                       │    · Allocator  — envelope allocation        │  slow · $$ · aggregate
                       │    · Scanner    — scan-fire read-why         │  minutes · single-name
                       └──────────────────────┬──────────────────────┘
                                              │  arms / assigns Coverage / authors leaves
                       ┌──────────────────────┴──────────────────────┐
                       │  Trader node  (runs a Book: manages a leaf)  │
                       │    · Strategist — frames + authors plans     │  a few/day · $$ · frontier
                       │    · Watcher    — manages · escalates        │  seconds · ¢ · fast reflex
                       │        └─ Trigger — summons the Watcher      │  sub-second · non-LLM
                       └──────────────────────┬──────────────────────┘
                                              │
        off-tape ······························┴······  Historian — reads Blotters after close,
        (no live seat's latency budget)               curates lineage + evolves the Brief

Reading the stack: Risk is the L0 layer, not a seat — strictly subtractive, above everyone. The PM runs a Pod (allocates children's envelopes, arms and de-arms, assigns Coverage, watches aggregates) and splits into an Allocator half and a Scanner half. The Trader runs a Book (a leaf, the only place positions live) and splits into a Strategist and a Watcher. The Trigger is the pod's third live tier below the Watcher — a non-LLM reflex that summons, never decides, and so reads the frozen Frame's features directly rather than a screen. The Historian works off-tape after the close, reading Blotters and Grades rather than a live Frame; it curates the pod's memory and evolves the Brief. Trigger and Historian have no View by construction, for opposite reasons — one reads below language, the other reads after the session.

The pod-seat roster is closed — pm, strategist, watcher — and it is the role axis of the engine's evidence cell key. A seat is admitted only where its sub-job genuinely diverges: by latency of at least an order of magnitude, by a typed boundary a document crosses, and by being independently measurable. That filter is why Risk stays a mechanism, the Grader stays an engine, and the Trigger stays a tier — none of them a seat.

How a View is chosen

Every wake resolves to exactly one View through a strict precedence:

explicit authored View  >  seat founder View  >  phase default

• An explicit view — one an agent authored, scheduled, or a Wake forced — always wins. A seat never overrides an authored lens.
• Otherwise, when the driver knows the acting seat, that seat's founder View for the frame kind is used (the Strategist's at the open, the Watcher's and the Scanner's on a wake).
• Otherwise the frame kind's phase default panes render — byte-identical to a run with no seat at all.

Seat Views are opt-in. By default a Session runs the phase-default panes and consults no seat; set seatViews: "founder" on the AgentConfig to have each acting seat read its View. The two settings are distinct experimental subjects and fold into the run's ConfigId automatically, so a founder run and a phase-default run are always separable in the record. Where a seat has no View for a frame kind — a Strategist at a wake, a Watcher at the open, the PM's allocation half — resolution falls through to the phase default; absence is a first-class value, never a silently fabricated screen.

Every rendered screen in this section is byte-real — generated from the live renderer, never hand-typed, so a renderer change re-pins the screens or CI goes red. Every View block is written in real Kestrel syntax and round-trips byte-stable against its golden corpus.

The seat axis

The Strategist and the Watcher are the two halves of the Trader that runs a Book; the Scanner and the PM's allocation cockpit are the two halves of the PM that runs a Pod. Each half is a distinct layout because each does a distinct job at a distinct speed — which is exactly the "different layout by task and timescale" this section is organized around.

The variant axis

A View is composed once and rendered against whatever market the instrument declares. The market a screen speaks is set by the instrument's SessionScheme — the registry attribute that declares an instrument's boundary stream (its opens, closes, and session splits). Four schemes ship today:

The founder Views documented here are the equity-index options variant, and their panes are options-native: the chain pane with its intrinsic-floored fair, the pin, the expiry-relative session ordinals, the theta the Watcher pays to hold. They render against equity-rth, the default scheme every equity and index instrument resolves to.

The other three schemes ride the same View grammar and the same seats. A perpetual's rolling UTC day has no daily close, so its prior-context pane names that absence instead of inventing a midnight bar; a CME instrument splits its RTH session from the overnight; spot FX runs a Wellington-open-to-NY-Friday-close week. As each variant's panes land, its layouts join this section as those Views — futures, perpetuals, and FX pages slot onto the variant axis without disturbing the seat axis, because a variant changes the market a View speaks, not the seat that reads it.