governance · the posture
Proprietary — and on the record.
kerte’s engine is proprietary. The source is not published — not to download, fork, or audit from the outside. What it owes you instead is a record you can check: every measure carries its citations, its belief updates, and its audit trail.
This is not a retreat from anything — it is a sharpening. The engine is audit-first: a record you can check, not a repository you can clone.
Proprietary. The engine code is not made available; there is no public licence to grant. The guarantee is the record, not the repository.
The platform is a real, owned asset. Commercial use, partnership, and acquisition are a single conversation — see below.
The discipline behind the engine
The engine is proprietary. How it’s built is on the record — for an evaluator, a partner, or an acquirer, that record is what shows the engine is real and built seriously.
Decisions on the record
Every architectural choice is an Architecture Decision Record — the question, the options, the trade-offs, the call, and the date. Nothing structural changes without one. The record is continuous and kept; the history is the argument.
Reasoning on the record
The audit log is not paperwork wrapped around the engine. It is the engine’s output: every interpretation, every challenge, every estimate update, recorded. Transparency here is structural, not a marketing line.
Five contracts that block, not suggest
Test, traceability, bug, scope, topology. Each is a gate the work cannot bypass — a change that breaks a contract does not merge. Discipline that is optional is not discipline; these are not optional.
A bar the hardest claim must clear
The engine’s most demanding claim has a published readiness standard and a validation harness behind it. The bar holds even when the honest answer is “not yet” — and saying “not yet” in public is itself part of the standard.
The five things the engine will not negotiate
Most of the engine is configurable. Exactly five things are not. They are the reason a measure means the same thing across every compass:
- The four-step method — As-Is → To-Be → Gap → Roadmap. The skeleton does not bend.
- Three epistemology modes — deterministic, stochastic, composite. A fourth needs an ADR.
- The CMMI 1.0–5.0 scale — the words per band can be tuned; the numbers cannot.
- Behavioral evidence with a deterministic floor — the canonical stochastic implementation.
- Audit logging — every interpretation, challenge, and update, recorded. Not optional.
Everything else — endpoints, names, defaults, adapters — can change under ordinary decision discipline. These five change only with a major version and explicit owner approval.
using kerte
If you want to use it
Most teams run the product on kerte.io. Anything beyond that — the engine inside your own context — is a conversation. One door covers it.