Establishing what delegated work did, and making that binding on what happens next, needs more than a check at the end. It needs a layer that reads your authoritative systems, holds the execution context behind every action, and owns the boundary where an intention becomes a real effect.
This page is how that is built: the layers, what the supervision layer reads, what changes once Cogward is in the dispatch path, and what the first-party runtime adds. Teams keep their preferred frameworks and models.
Full platform architecture. See the capability map for what is available today, in preview, and planned, or the supervision method for how a workflow moves from human-checked to autonomous.
Each layer depends on the ones beneath it. Agents run inside the runtime foundation; control is enforced in the execution path; evidence is generated as a byproduct of that execution; and the governed lifecycle is what the runtime makes possible once every production run flows through the same boundary.
The layer on top is what the other four are for. Supervision establishes what the work actually did against your authoritative systems, keeps the uncertainty that cannot be resolved, and decides what may happen next. It can run without the four beneath it, reading your systems from outside the execution path. What it cannot do from there is make its decision binding.
at the boundary policy · identity · delegated authority · limits, evaluated before the call leaves · ● established ◐ unknown ○ held
Work that closes is the easy half. The layers below exist for the two lanes that stop.
Supervision is not a check bolted to the end of a run. It is one context per unit of work, assembled while the work happens, and these are the questions it exists to answer. No single source answers more than one of them.
Answering one of these is a feature. Holding all six against the same unit of work, in time to act on them, is the layer.
Retrieved knowledge can inform supervision. Only authoritative knowledge can bind it. Organizational context reaches the work as advisory by default, and binds only where you have declared that source authoritative for that scope. Two authoritative sources that disagree hold rather than resolving by recency.
A policy engine answers whether an agent may issue a five hundred dollar refund. Holding the outcome, the uncertainty, the authority and the accumulated exposure together answers a harder question, at the moment the action wants to leave.
Reading your systems can be done from outside. Holding an action, releasing a retry, or recovering an ambiguous effect cannot, and the reason is an ordering property rather than an integration preference.
The record that makes recovery possible is written before the call leaves, not after it. Later evidence can often establish what the state is now. What it cannot reliably establish, without a durable record of the intent and a stable action identity, is which attempt produced that state and whether a retry would double it.
The runtime turns uncertainty into durable state instead of letting the agent reason past it.
Supervision depth is a set of guarantees, not a marketing ladder. Each rung buys something specific and leaves something out, and the honest version is more useful to an architect than a complete one would be.
Whether the intended state exists in your systems, whether the evidence for that was fresh or unavailable, and therefore which work needs a person.
Cannot: attribute an effect to the attempt that produced it, stop the next action, or release a retry safely, because none of that is available without the dispatch record.
Everything above, plus which attempt produced the state you can see, and it can act: hold before dispatch, refuse an unsafe retry, require approval, redirect. Any execution path Cogward controls can do this, including a gateway or a sidecar that owns dispatch and durable retry.
Cannot: account for work that ran before Cogward was in the path, or hold state across a crash it did not own.
Everything above, plus uncertainty that survives a crash, reconciliation against the target, and compensation supervised as its own unit of work.
Cannot: undo an effect that has no inverse. A sent message, a disclosed record, a settled payment: those are recorded and reported, not reversed.
Where no authoritative read exists for a condition, the result stays unknown and holds. Cogward does not infer a result from missing evidence, and it cannot certify that a confirmed result is objectively correct: you define what done means, and Cogward establishes it against the source you named.
The evidence does not merely describe the run. It changes what the runtime is allowed to do next.
The four rungs above supervise work running in another execution environment. The last one makes Cogward the execution environment.
When work runs in Cogward's runtime, one durable execution context holds the work's objective, the identity and delegated authority it acts under, every effect it attempts, the evidence that came back, the uncertainty that remains, and the decision about what may happen next. That is the deepest supervision Cogward offers, and it is a different kind of thing from a deeper integration.
the loop closes: control returns to execution, under the new state
Inside the Cogward runtime, the work objective and completion definition lead to identity and delegated authority, then agent execution, then a state-changing action whose effect identity is recorded, then the enterprise system, then authoritative evidence. Evidence either establishes the result, which continues the work, or leaves it uncertain, which holds, reconciles, compensates, or sends it to a person. Either way the next decision is made on what is known, and control returns to execution under the new state.
Cogward separates durable session state from disposable workers. Tenant, user, version, delegated authority, workspace, approvals, and evidence lineage remain bound to the session, while execution can pause, recover, or move between isolated workers without losing that continuity.
Sessions survive pauses and failures while state stays bound to the correct tenant, agent, version, and user.
External access is a property of the runtime, not a library each framework and product team has to wire up correctly. Every outbound call is mediated at one boundary below the framework, where identity, authority, policy, credentials, and approval are applied before the action runs.
Because every policy decision, approval, lifecycle event, and controlled model or tool call passes through the execution path, the record is a byproduct of execution. Cogward produces two records, because no single artifact serves both an SRE mid-incident and an auditor a year later.
Each record carries the identity, version, policy, and approval context resolved at the execution boundary, so it ties back to the exact trajectory it describes.
Once every production run passes through the same runtime, it holds a vantage no standalone monitoring tool occupies: it sees identity, declared purpose, lifecycle state, policy, and outcome together, for every agent, version, tenant, and run. Evaluation runs over the trajectories production actually creates, and its verdicts feed the same lifecycle authority operators exercise directly.
A point observability tool sees the infrastructure an agent ran on; the runtime sees whether the agent is still doing what it was registered to do.
Cogward does not replace your framework, model, identity provider, policy engine, observability platform, SIEM, or the systems that hold your organizational knowledge. It supplies the shared runtime context and execution boundary that lets them participate consistently in agent production.
Cogward does not build the organizational brain. It makes organizational knowledge actionable inside supervision. Your context systems keep indexing, retrieval and search. Cogward decides what a retrieved statement means for one unit of delegated work: whether it applies, what produced it, whether it is authoritative or advisory, and which version was in force while the work ran.
Explore the complete capability mapReview runtime, identity, policy, evaluation, lifecycle, evidence, and deployment capabilities, including what is available today, in preview, and planned.
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