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Lotor

A local receipt and approval gate for AI agent sessions. The agent can act, but it cannot sign.

What it is

Lotor writes a signed, tamper-evident log of what an agent did during a session: actions performed, files touched, messages sent, costs incurred, failures encountered. The log lives on your machine, in a format you can inspect, verify and archive.

It does not prove the agent's actions were correct. It records them, and makes later tampering detectable.

It also gates the actions you choose. Those stop and wait for an approval signed with a passphrase the model has never seen and cannot derive. An agent can request a consequential action. It cannot authorize one.

Local first, and not as a deployment option. The receipt is written to your machine and nowhere else. No upload path, no account, no server component. Nothing leaves because nothing is built to send it. Much accountability tooling is cloud observability, which means your agent's history becomes inventory in someone else's books. Lotor is not the only local one: Obsigna (agentreceipts.ai) ships a local, signed, tamper-evident record with a Claude Code hook, is formally verified, and predates this repo. What this repo adds on top of a record is the gate that blocks until a human signs, and a ledger that confesses its own limits. The record of what your machines did for you should answer to your key, not to a vendor's retention policy.

Longer arguments for why that matters live at ikeanalytics.com, including the measurement behind them. This file is about running the thing.

What you use it for

Know what ran. Ask the record instead of re-reading transcripts. It is cheaper than reconstruction and it is not subject to the agent's account of itself. A worker in this project once reported which model it was running on, in the section of its own report reserved for admitting uncertainty, and was wrong. The receipt was not.

Sleep through it. Wake up to a signed account of an unattended run rather than a pile of transcripts you will never read.

Stop the expensive ones. Deletes, deploys, sends and spends fail closed until you sign that exact action with its exact parameters. The denial and the approval are both receipted.

Hold your own copy. When a client, vendor or counterparty disputes what happened, the record is yours. Their books, and now yours.

Claim discipline

Measurement, not indictment. A receipt records what the session self-reports. It does not judge intent and it does not catch silent failures.

Self-attested capture. The log begins at signing time. What happened before that moment is not covered by the chain.

Nothing written in the present tense here is unbuilt. Anything not built is named as pending, in the same breath, either below or in KNOWN-LIMITS.md.

Herding modes

When multiple agents coordinate, they should be treated as cattle, not pets. Lotor is built for that.

One agent is easy to trust. It acts on the intent you gave it, and the modes below only ever restate that intent. Put agents to work together and the picture changes. Herds move in ways no single animal chose, and people do the same: in a crowd they get carried along and decide things that cut against what they would choose alone. A gated action is not a verdict on any one agent. It is the fence that holds while the herd moves.

Ten matchers is not a posture anyone can hold in their head. Three presets replace the matrix with one choice.

Mode	Posture	Egress rules (push, publish, egress-other, opaque-exec)	Local-only rules (destructive, scope-escalation)
Herded	the pen	gate	gate
Grazing	the fence, and the default on a fresh install	gate	warn
Loose	the open field	warn	warn

self-mod and mode-change gate in every mode, with no exception. Loose means free to act on the world, not free to rewrite what stops you. An agent in Loose still cannot edit the gate, its policy, its hooks, or switch modes without your signature.

Loose never turns a rule fully off. It warns, which still appends a receipt. The alternative would make the most dangerous mode the one that leaves the least evidence, since an unmatched rule takes a fast path with no chain write.

npm run mode              # print the current mode and its rule-by-rule expansion
npm run mode -- herded    # switch (requires your approval passphrase at a real terminal)

The mode in force is stamped into every session's opening receipt, so a switch is never invisible after the fact. An existing policy.json from before this feature is not silently upgraded: it keeps its rules and loads as mode custom.

Honest limit. Lotor's mode is independent of your harness's own permission mode and the two do not compensate for one another. Loose plus a harness set to bypass its own checks is genuinely nothing stopping anything on either layer. Lotor warns when it sees that combination and records the posture once per session. Detection is not protection. See KNOWN-LIMITS.md item 15.

Install

Installing Lotor means opting into two invariants: the record is written to your machine and nowhere else, and the actions you put behind the gate fail closed until you sign them. Everything below is a choice about where those happen, not whether.

Read the second one precisely. The gate covers the rules you have set to gate, matched on tool name and parameters. It is not a claim that nothing can leave your machine. See KNOWN-LIMITS.md item 11 for what the matcher does and does not catch, and check lotor_status for which rules are gated versus merely warned on your install.

Lotor is two pieces that install separately. An MCP server, which gives you the tools to query, verify and approve. And four Claude Code hooks, which are what actually record and what actually gate. Installing one without the other is the most common way to end up thinking Lotor is running when it is not.

Prerequisites

• Node 18 or later, and a working claude CLI if you are installing into Claude Code.
• A text editor, and willingness to hand-edit a JSON file. This is the one that surprises people, so it is stated here rather than discovered at step 5.

Why Lotor does not install its own hooks. It could. It deliberately does not. A tool that can silently register its own enforcement into your settings is a tool that can silently unregister it, and a gate you did not knowingly install is a gate you have no reason to trust. The settings file is inside your threat model, not outside it. The cost is one paste. The benefit is that you know exactly what is running.

1. Where it runs

Install target	What it can receipt	Reach
Claude Code, user scope	every Claude Code session, in every project	widest, always on
Claude Code, project scope	only sessions started inside that one repo	scoped to a project
Claude Desktop extension (.mcpb)	Claude Desktop app sessions	the desktop app

claude mcp add lotor -s user -- node /absolute/path/to/lotor/src/mcp/server.js

Use -s project instead to wire Lotor into a single repo, which writes a committed .mcp.json there. For the one-click desktop path see MCP-SETUP.md.

2. Where receipts live

Lotor keeps one canonical store so your chain never fragments. By default ~/.lotor, or %USERPROFILE%\.lotor on Windows. Every CLI and the MCP server read and write that same store regardless of which directory the client launched from. Override with LOTOR_HOME.

Keep this on real local disk. Point LOTOR_HOME at a synced cloud folder and you have handed your receipt log back to a third party, which is the exact custody Lotor exists to remove.

3. Activate it

Clients load MCP servers at session start. Restart your session or open a new one. Restarting the session you installed from is enough.

4. First run: set your key

npm run setup

Setup creates your log-integrity key, then walks you through setting a passphrase for your approval key. The approval key's private half is never written to disk. It is derived from your passphrase at the moment you approve an action, and nowhere else.

Setting the key does not arm the gate. The key is what a signature is made of. The hooks are what stops an action and asks for one. A Lotor install with a passphrase set and no hooks registered records nothing and blocks nothing. Do step 5.

5. Register the hooks (required)

This is the step that turns Lotor from a library into a gate. Skip it and you have installed a query tool against an empty log.

Open your Claude Code settings file (~/.claude/settings.json, or %USERPROFILE%\.claude\settings.json on Windows) and merge in the block below, substituting your own absolute path. If the file already has a hooks key, add these four events inside it rather than replacing it. Forward slashes work on every platform, including Windows.

{
  "hooks": {
    "SessionStart": [
      { "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "node /absolute/path/to/lotor/bin/hook-session-start.js" } ] }
    ],
    "PreToolUse": [
      { "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "node /absolute/path/to/lotor/bin/hook-pre-tool-use.js" } ] }
    ],
    "PostToolUse": [
      { "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "node /absolute/path/to/lotor/bin/hook-post-tool-use.js" } ] }
    ],
    "SessionEnd": [
      { "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "node /absolute/path/to/lotor/bin/hook-session-end.js" } ] }
    ]
  }
}

Hook	What it does	What is missing without it
SessionStart	opens the record: session id, policy in force, chain head, hook registration	a session that dies badly leaves no trace, and the log looks clean
PreToolUse	the gate: gated rules fail closed until you sign	nothing is ever blocked, whatever your policy says
PostToolUse	captures egress-shaped calls as they complete	outbound activity is only ever reconstructed later
SessionEnd	closes the record: what ran, what it touched, what it cost	no session receipt is written

If you would rather not edit JSON by hand, the interactive claude CLI has a /hooks command that writes the same file through a menu.

Restart your session after editing. Hooks are read at session start, so the edit takes effect on the next one.

None of these hooks can break your session. None exits non-zero except the gate, and only when it is blocking on purpose. None writes to stdout. Every other failure is swallowed with a one-line note to stderr. A receipt layer that can wedge your editor is worse than no receipt layer.

Two things to be clear-eyed about. Hook registration lives in a file you can edit, so it is part of your threat model. SessionStart snapshots which hooks were present, so a between-session edit shows up at the next start. And the gate only covers tool calls made after its hook is loading.

6. Confirm it is live

npm run receipts

Look at the SESSION OPENS block. During a live session you should see one more opened than closed: that is your current session. If it reads Opened: 0, the SessionStart hook is not registered and step 5 did not take. Inside Claude, the lotor_status tool reports the same thing.

If you skip step 5 entirely, nothing is recorded automatically and you are back to ingesting a transcript by hand with npm run ingest -- /path/to/session.jsonl.

Delegation grants

A single-use approval covers one exact command and is spent once. That is right for a deploy and wrong for a working session: forty gated actions means forty trips to a terminal, and a gate that expensive gets switched off, which is the failure it existed to prevent.

A grant is one signature over N enumerated requests, bound to one session, with an expiry and a shared action ceiling. Before the passphrase prompt it prints every request in full, untruncated. Reading that list is the security of the mechanism.

npm run grant -- --session <id> --all-pending --max-actions 20 --expires-in-ms 3600000

The non-delegable core. A hard-coded set of paths no grant may ever cover, because a grant able to edit the verifier could widen every future grant. The gate, the policy, the hooks, the key handling, and the grant machinery itself. Work on those costs one signature per action, forever. The core is small so the expense is bounded.

Honest limit. A grant is reviewed once and spendable up to its ceiling, so a command you approved can run repeatedly without further review. That is the trade, made deliberately. See KNOWN-LIMITS 17.

Not built yet

• Scoped custodial integrations. The sanctioned path for a redacted slice of your record to reach an auditor, a client or your own IT. npm run export packages the whole chain with its public key so it verifies off the machine that wrote it, but whole-chain-or-nothing is the only granularity there is. Selective disclosure is the piece that does not exist. Reach out for details.
• External anchoring. Without a timestamp authority the chain proves alteration but not erasure: truncating the tail leaves a shorter chain that still verifies. See KNOWN-LIMITS 3.
• Hardware-backed key custody. The chain key sits on disk in plaintext. See KNOWN-LIMITS 8.
• Per-harness cost attribution. Receipts carry a per-model breakdown (cost.byModel). Cost is still not broken down per harness, and the top-line total is a blend reported under the last model seen, so read byModel and never the total. See KNOWN-LIMITS 13.

Known limits

Everything I know to be wrong with Lotor is in KNOWN-LIMITS.md, written against my own interest, because a list of your own product's weaknesses is the one claim in this repository that is expensive to fake.

Some are open bounties. The confession board publishes them with a file:line anchor, a scope, and acceptance criteria written so you can check your own work without me in the loop.

ID	Title	Difficulty
A1	Armed. Install Lotor, arm the gate, earn your first signed receipt	trivial
LOTOR-C1	Data leaves in a GET query string, ungated and uncaptured	medium
LOTOR-C2	A dangerous command that a gated rule does not catch	hard
LOTOR-C3	A bare git push to a checked-out protected branch is not seen	medium

You claim one with a signed Lotor receipt of your own work, so claiming a bounty means running the tool. Attribution and contributor status. No money in this round.

And if you read KNOWN-LIMITS and come back with an entry that is not on it yet, you have done something better than close a bounty.

Development

npm install
npm test

See DEMO.md for a runnable walkthrough and MCP-SETUP.md for the MCP config block and the tools it exposes.