orchestration // escapement
Metered dispatch for the agent constellation.
Escapement is the scheduling and dispatch layer that converts continuous agent intent into discrete, metered ticks. Named after the escapement mechanism in mechanical clocks — the component that releases energy in exact, counted increments rather than all at once. It dispatches blackwall custody runs as one-shot jobs, executes DAG plans, and carries custody provenance through the entire dispatch lifecycle.
What it does
Metered dispatch
Converts a continuous stream of dispatch requests into discrete, rate-bounded ticks. Each run is admitted, queued, and released on a deterministic schedule — preventing the LLM-orchestration failure mode where a dozen subagents fire at once and saturate the model provider or the cluster.
DAG plan execution
Executes multi-step plans as directed acyclic graphs rather than flat task lists. Each node is a dispatch unit with declared dependencies; a node is released only when its parents have settled. Parallel branches advance concurrently, serial sections are enforced by edge ordering, and the graph's settle-state is observable at every tick.
Custody provenance
Every dispatched job carries a custody chain from origin to settlement. Provenance records the invoking agent, the parent dispatch, the DAG node and plan, the inputs, and the resulting artifacts. A run's lineage is reconstructable end-to-end — no orphan jobs, no lost attribution.
Admission control
A gating plane in front of the dispatch queue. Incoming requests are matched against concurrency limits, token budgets, dependency readiness, and trust state before they reach a worker. Backpressure is explicit: rejected or deferred requests return a reason, not a silent drop.
Architecture
| Component | Role |
|---|---|
| core engine | Rust core. Owns the metering loop, the dispatch clock, and the settle-state machine. Releases ticks, observes completions, advances the DAG. |
| edge worker | Runs the dispatched one-shot jobs — blackwall custody runs and DAG node executions. Talks back to the core via the dispatch queue. |
| dispatch queue | The metered channel between core and worker. Admission-controlled, ordered, with explicit backpressure. Nothing is dispatched out of turn. |
| DAG planner | Parses a plan into a dependency graph, tracks per-node readiness, and feeds releasable nodes to the core on each tick. |
| metering table | Source of truth for per-session, per-agent, and per-cluster budgets. Drives admission-control decisions and is the substrate for observability. |
Status
Escapement is under active development. The Rust core engine and the dispatch-queue / DAG-planner contracts are stabilizing; the edge worker and custody-provenance transport are in flight. Dispatches blackwall custody runs today; the full metering-table surface and admission-control gates are still being wired through.