Research architecture
ERQYO
Event Rhythm Qualifier · Yoked Operator · Adaptive Decision Runtime
ERQYO is a research architecture for deciding what an AI system should do next, when, and under whose authority. Its design treats the rhythm of events and working relationships as an input to that decision, while keeping authority, policy and evidence governed separately.
Status: Research architecture · reference implementation
Two parts, deliberately apart
Rhythm influences qualification.
Constraints govern operation.
- ERQ · Event Rhythm Qualifier
- The adaptive side. It reads the event, the state around it and the observed rhythm of the people and processes involved, and ranks what appears appropriate next. It proposes; it does not decide whether a proposal may proceed.
- YO · Yoked Operator
- The governed side. It takes what ERQ proposed and checks it against authority, policy, evidence and hard time limits, then permits it, defers it, hands it to a person or refuses it.
YO is yoked to authoritative constraints, not to ERQ. It is free to overrule the qualifier in either direction: to refuse an action ERQ was confident about, and to escalate when ERQ would have waited past a deadline.
How a decision moves through it
- Event or state change
- Operational state
- Rhythm, actor clocks and temporal context
- Candidate outcomes
- ERQ
- Qualified candidate
- YO
- Authority, policy, evidence and hard constraints
- Qualified outcome
Learned rhythm can influence only the proposal. Authority, policy and evidence reach the operator directly and never pass through the qualifier.
What it can decide
- ACT
- Proceed now.
- WAIT
- Not yet. The decision stays open and is reopened by a later event or by the clock.
- ASK
- Something required is missing; request it before proceeding.
- REASSESS
- Something the decision depended on has changed; decide again.
- ESCALATE
- Raise the decision to a higher authority, typically when a limit or a deadline is involved.
- HANDOFF
- Give the decision to a person, because the system holds no authority to make it.
- ABSTAIN
- Decline to decide, when confidence is too low to act on. A legitimate result, not a failure.
- BLOCK
- Refuse, because policy or a hard constraint forbids it.
These are the eight outcomes that matter most for governance. The reference implementation's closed vocabulary has two more: RESPOND, a reply to the counterpart that counts as acting, and DELEGATE, passing the decision to another actor who holds authority for it.
Where it stands
A reference implementation of the architecture exists in the AnyLAI repository, with tests covering the separation between qualifier and operator. It is not deployed and has no public interface. Nothing in production calls it: the one caller that exists runs in shadow mode behind switches that are off, and acts on nothing. It is research code, and this page describes a design rather than a service.
What ERQYO does not claim
Stateful agents, human review, timers, workflow engines and next-best-action systems all predate ERQYO, and it borrows from each. Its question is narrower: how to let a system learn when to act without letting what it learns decide whether it may. It provides no legal or organisational authority of its own.
Research project · Independent R&D · Not a commercial offering