Kya

Know Your Agents (KYA) Governance Review

Use this skill to answer a different question from "is the run fast?" (see [duct](../duct/SKILL.md)) or "is the metric improving within budget?" (see [labnb](../labnb/SKILL.md)): is the agent authorized, policy-compliant, and uncompromised?

It wraps veldt-kya ("Know Your Agents", Apache-2.0), a governance SDK that risk-scores agents, runs consensus judges over their behavior, detects drift from an approved definition, and produces regulator-grade compliance evidence.

This is the third review axis in this repo: duct = resource accounting, labnb = budget / experimental-validity accounting, kya = trust / authorization / compliance accounting.

When To Use

• Before granting an agent a privileged action (writing outside scope, executing SQL, calling external services), score or consensus-check it first.
• When a long-running labnb experiment should stop if the agent drifts from its approved configuration or trips a policy judge — not only when the metric stalls.
• When a run touches regulated or PII-bearing data and needs auditable authorization evidence (GDPR, HIPAA, EU AI Act, and similar).

Skip it for ordinary, low-stakes local iteration; governance has real cost (see Guardrails).

Install

pip install veldt-kya   # Apache-2.0

veldt-kya is a heavier, pre-1.0 dependency (database, identity bindings, optional external judges). Keep it optional — it is never required by the labnb core. Install it only in environments that need governance.

Core Capabilities

from kya import score_agent, normalize_agent_def
from kya import canonical_hash, detect_drift
from kya.scorer_orchestrator import check_consensus, register_available_adapters
from kya import compliance_summary

• Pre-deployment scoring — score_agent(...) returns an object with score, a severity bucket (e.g. "critical"), and per-factor factors (each with .name / .delta).
• Runtime consensus — check_consensus(...) runs multiple judges in parallel and returns consensus (OK / SPLIT / UNCLEAR / BREACH), per_dimension scores (input_safety, safety, faithfulness), and per-judges detail.
• Drift detection — canonical_hash(definition) plus detect_drift(...) flag unauthorized configuration changes against an approved baseline.
• Compliance evidence — compliance_summary(...) emits model cards / breach-notification artifacts across many regimes.

Producing A labnb Governance Verdict

labnb's monitor_slice.py check can break a slice on a governance signal, but it stays dependency-free: it reads a small JSON verdict file rather than importing KYA. This skill's job is to run a governance check and write that verdict.

Canonical verdict schema (all keys optional):

{
  "decision": "allow | warn | block",
  "trust_score": 0.0,
  "drift": false,
  "reasons": ["short human-readable reasons"]
}

Map a KYA result onto it, then write it with the bundled helper:

from kya.scorer_orchestrator import check_consensus
verdict = check_consensus(...)              # consensus: OK | SPLIT | UNCLEAR | BREACH
decision = "block" if verdict.consensus == "BREACH" else (
    "warn" if verdict.consensus in ("SPLIT", "UNCLEAR") else "allow")

python skills/kya/scripts/write_verdict.py \
  --output "$EXPERIMENT_DIR/artifacts/governance.json" \
  --decision "$decision" \
  --trust-score 0.41 \
  --reason "consensus=BREACH on faithfulness judge"

write_verdict.py is deterministic and tool-agnostic: it validates the fields and writes the canonical schema, so you can drive it from KYA, detect_drift, or any other governance source.

Feeding It Into The Loop

Point labnb's monitor at the verdict so a compromised or unauthorized slice breaks (with the highest break priority — governance outranks budget, engineering, and validity):

python skills/labnb/scripts/monitor_slice.py check \
  --experiment-dir "$EXPERIMENT_DIR" \
  --governance-file "$EXPERIMENT_DIR/artifacts/governance.json" \
  --min-trust-score 0.6 --break-on-drift

A block decision, a trust_score below --min-trust-score, or drift: true (with --break-on-drift) breaks the slice and moves the entry to blocked; a warn decision is advisory. This also fits labnb's Action Gate: run the check before any write-bearing or privileged step.

The gate fails closed: once --governance-file is set, if the verdict file is missing, unreadable, or malformed the monitor treats it as a block. So always write a verdict before the check — including a conservative one (e.g. decision: "warn" or "block") when KYA or its judges are unavailable — rather than leaving the file absent.

Guardrails

1. Respect any parent constitution, project policy, or task-level write constraint already in scope.
2. Keep veldt-kya optional. Never make it a hard dependency of the labnb core or of offline CI; the verdict-file seam exists precisely so labnb stays dependency-free.
3. Governance has cost. Consensus judging may call LLMs or external services (e.g. Fiddler, Presidio); count that time and spend against the same labnb budget, per labnb's budget policy.
4. Handle a degraded/offline path: if KYA or its judges are unavailable, emit a conservative verdict (for example decision: "warn") rather than silently treating the run as authorized.
5. Treat the project as pre-1.0 and verify its behavior before relying on it for real compliance decisions; do not present its output as legal/regulatory advice.
6. Do not send secrets or unminimized PII to external judges; use KYA's PII scanning and scrub before sharing.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: sensein
• Source: sensein/agent_skills
• License: Apache-2.0

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.