“Done” lives in the database, not in the model’s mouth.
Coding agents produce the most verifiable outcomes on earth — PR merged, tests green, deploy live. GOVENANT keeps “done” in the repo and CI, not in the model’s mouth. Any coding agent, any model.
GOVENANT does not govern “Claude agents” or “OpenAI agents.” It governs the evidence trail of autonomous work. Keep the runner (the tool you audit from) separate from the system under audit (your agents):
An AI client you already use reads the open instrument and drives the read-only sweep. This is the runner — not the thing being judged.
Any agent system with an observable record of actions and outcomes — whatever built it. The agent never has to "support GOVENANT."
Ground truth: the database + actions + outcomes + duties + gates — the substrate, never the logs’ self-report.
PR merged, tests green, deploy live — coding agents produce terminal outcomes the record can verify. That makes this the easiest class of agents to govern honestly, and the least excusable to leave ungoverned.
When agents write your code, the question is not what they said they did — it’s what shipped, verified against CI and the repo record. Motion is not delivery.
Most tools in this class speak MCP, so the free hosted GOVENANT Audit connects now. The governed substrate then turns agent output into a standing, sweepable delivery record.
A platform team runs a fleet of coding agents that open ~300 pull requests a week across forty repos. The dashboard is green; velocity is up and to the right.
Leadership can’t answer a board question: of everything the agents “shipped,” how much actually merged, passed CI, and stayed green — versus PRs that were opened, auto-approved by another agent, and quietly reverted three days later? Velocity counts motion; nobody is counting delivery.
Keyed to merged-and-green, the sweep shows 71% of agent PRs delivered — and surfaces a cluster of “completed” tasks whose deploys never went out and two repos where the agent was reviewing its own PRs. The number is lower than the dashboard, and for the first time it’s defensible.
The substrate: The repository: commits, pull requests, CI results, deploys — a terminal, verifiable record of what actually shipped.
The path — Native substrate: The platform already produces records that map to the standard — the sweep reads what it already keeps.
The full requirements live in the open standard (CC BY 4.0) — the substrate shapes, the acceptance tests, and the conformance ladder your record is measured against.
A real integration can wear the Built-on GOVENANT badge under its four rules from day one. The ladder — Logged → Gated → Delivered → Earned — is self-assessed against the open standard and published to the registry with probe logs, open to challenge. For coding agents the Delivered rung has teeth: it means the record shows verified shipped work, not activity.
Per-stack integration patterns for common ways to build coding agents — each with its own natural hook into the substrate:
Building it a different way? Browse all integrations — or run the free audit from any MCP-capable tool.