Local-model runner (P9) · 4 units
A substrate your local model can drive
You run your own models, locally, and you want a substrate they can drive without a human in the loop. This path is Kestrel-native first — the four statements, the Frame, envelopes — then the market fundamentals underneath, so a local agent has both the language and the ground it stands on. Every unit has a plain-markdown twin your model can read directly.
Start the pathView, Wake, Plan, Grade- Kestrel-native · BeginnerView, Wake, Plan, GradeKestrel is one small language with exactly four kinds of statement, and together they are the whole thing an agent needs to work a market. A View sees the market as attributed text — the panes it needs, at a token budget. A Wake decides when to look — an event, never an arbitrary clock — and hands control back to the agent. A Plan compiles one bounded thesis into a deterministic reflex the runtime fires at the tick, with no wall time, no nondeterminism, and no silent defaults. A Grade evaluates what happened against a baseline and returns a replayable, signed receipt. The whole design is slow judgment compiled into a fast reflex: the deliberating brain authors these statements, then leaves the hot path so machine-speed reaction is deterministic. Two properties keep them safe rather than merely clever — risk is a type (`budget`), and authority expires (`ttl`). This unit teaches how the four fit together.
- Kestrel-native · BeginnerReading a Frame like an agent doesA Frame is one materialized instant of a View — the typed bundle of values the agent reads on a single wake. Its atom is the Field: a value plus one of six provenance tags and a source watermark saying where it came from. The tags are OBS (an observed datum), CALC (a deterministic transform of it), DETECTOR (a named pattern detector's output), MODEL (a model output, which must carry its receipt and confidence), POLICY (a configured platform decision), and UNKNOWN (explicitly unavailable). That last tag is the whole ethic: a value that is genuinely not knowable renders as explicit UNKNOWN, never a guessed or defaulted number, because a token-efficient wrong number is worse than an expensive right one. On a violent move the SHOCK frame delivers measurements, not a story — it refuses to editorialize. And when the canonical feed goes stale the screen fails closed. This unit teaches how to read a Frame the way an agent must, tag by tag.
- Kestrel-native · IntermediateThe one authorization primitiveKestrel has exactly one primitive for authority: the Envelope, a signed grant of the form scope, budget, ceiling, expiry, revocation, attached to a node of the pod tree. Everything an agent is permitted to spend or risk is an Envelope, and it has three properties that make authority safe rather than hopeful. It is narrowing-only — a child Envelope can only ever be tighter than its parent, never wider, so authority shrinks as it flows down the tree and can never quietly grow. It carries a mandatory expiry — there is no permission without an end date, so stale authority cannot linger. And it supports one-tap revocation that takes down only the subtree's own orders. The point is that authority is a type the runtime enforces at the moment of action, not a policy comment a well-behaved agent is trusted to honor. This unit teaches why a single, typed, narrowing grant is stronger than any amount of good intent.
- Market fundamentals · BeginnerWhat a chart actually isA chart is an event record, not a picture. It plots price against time, and each candle compresses one interval into four numbers: the open and close, where price started and ended, and the high and low, how far it reached each way. The body spans open to close; the thin wicks mark the extremes. Colour encodes direction only — green closed above its open, red below — never good or bad. Read left to right, a run of candles becomes a sentence: where price began, what it tested, where it settled. A chart records what happened and when. It does not encode why, and it does not tell you what happens next. Learning to read one is learning the alphabet before you can read the words. This unit defines the candle, then reads a generic session as a story you can run and recompute yourself.