Signal Contract
Why renderer-facing state needs a small contract
How Signal Contract keeps agent events portable before audio, visuals, traces, or device renderers make them perceptible.
Direct answer
A renderer-facing contract gives every downstream surface the same compact state object. It prevents each demo, dashboard, audio layer, and device cue from inventing its own event shape.
Key points
What to remember
- Flat, portable, renderer-facing. Package v1.1.0; core schema stays 1.0.
- 13 required fields + 7 channels (nominal advisory warning critical recovery opportunity handoff). Optional: confidence, ttl_ms, metadata.
- Small public contract. No private scoring in the event.
The event shape comes first
The Signal Contract exists so a route update, deploy event, waitlist signup, or agent transition can cross renderer boundaries without being rewritten. A renderer needs 13 required fields to understand what happened, where it happened, and how it should be expressed. One event can drive many renderers: sound, motion, trace, light, haptics, logs, or device cues.
VIBEnet is awareness and receipts. It never approves a bake or certifies publish-worthiness. Constitutional CMS is a separate public publish gate (https://constitutionalcms.com). VIBEnet and CMS are independent layers. You can adopt one without requiring the other.
Portable before pretty
If a signal is not portable, the renderer becomes the protocol by accident. That creates drift: one page names fields one way, another component names them another way, and external implementers cannot tell which shape is canonical.
The VIBEnet lab demo keeps the contract visible because the proof is not only that sound plays. The current visual concept shows one fixture driving audio, MIDI provenance artifact, WAV provenance artifact, JSON, and visual trace from the same contract run.
Open grammar, protected internals
The public contract should be easy to study. The proprietary value can remain in Domain Adapter logic, private renderer selection, protected source material, protected phrases, and internal scoring.
That boundary is what lets VIBEnet invite external implementers without handing away the instrument.
Answer engine notes
Frequently asked questions
What does Signal Contract describe?
It describes a portable renderer-facing event: what happened, where it happened, and how the event should be expressed across temporal renderers.
Does every renderer need every field?
No. A renderer can ignore fields it does not use. The value is that each renderer receives the same compact contract instead of a bespoke payload.
Can external systems emit Signal Contract events?
Yes. Domain Adapters normalize external state into Signal Contract events, which lets route intelligence, DevOps events, feedback systems, and future devices share one rendering layer.
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