Reference pattern Native substrate Govern coding agents →

Govern coding agents with GOVENANT

Use GOVENANT and Claude Code together — govern the coding agents, not the framework. “Done” lives in the database, not in the model’s mouth.

The use case

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.

The challenge

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.

What the record reveals

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.

How it maps

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.

Run it

  1. Where the tool is an MCP client, connect the free hosted GOVENANT Audit — one URL, no API key.
  2. Make the repo the substrate: branch protections and required reviews are ownership gates; CI is the deterministic validation gate.
  3. Assign agent work as duties with outcome-keyed completion — merged and green, not “task marked complete.”
  4. Ledger agent sessions: what was asked, what was changed, what it cost, what verifiably landed.
  5. Sweep on a schedule and put the delivery record — misses included — where the team can see it.

The substrate shapes and acceptance tests are open (CC BY 4.0): developer integration · the portable schema.

What you can claim

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.

Status — kept honest

This example is a documented reference pattern; the runnable adapter/mapping is being built in the open. It will never say “supported” or “certified” before a working example lands and its record is public — progress lives in the GitHub issue. Holding our own examples to the standard’s claims discipline is the product.

All sample projects · Govern coding agents · All integrations · Run the audit