Design Principles

Govern, do not orchestrate

Orlo governs meaningful steps. It does not aim to become a general-purpose workflow engine.

Anchor to the production decision path

Orlo is designed for the operational surface where model output meets consequence: inference, retrieval, deployment, feedback, and agent-step decisions.

Consequence before capability

A system that works in staging can still fail badly in production. Orlo is designed to make those failure modes visible before they become expensive, unsafe, or hard to unwind.

Deterministic where possible

Validation and control logic should be deterministic and auditable.

Keep the boundary honest

Public packages should stay reusable and free of platform-specific coupling.

Fast gate, deep audit

Hot-path governance must stay bounded in latency. Richer auditing and history can go deeper without blocking the execution path.