zetesis

ζήτησις - systematic inquiry.

Sovereign research substrate: one Rust interface over research and search providers, with budget enforcement, quota accounting, cited result normalization, and bounded static acquisition. Most of that surface is still planned. The tables below separate what has landed from what has not.

Status: pre-release (0.0.x). The four-crate workspace has landed. sylloge carries the provider, constraint, network-target, static-acquisition, citation, result, cost, budget, and deep-research lifecycle types, and zetesis re-exports them. The only HTTP client is StaticAcquirer (anonymous static GET), which returns a versioned, fingerprinted evidence envelope; the Tier-0 providers (Semantic Scholar, arXiv, Wikipedia) fetch through it. No cache, durable ledger, model binding, or daemon exists yet. The contract baseline records what each public type enforces today and what is caller convention. Open work: _llm/current_state.toml lists the public open threads. Roadmap and blocker status are maintained outside this repository.

Why

Frontier-model built-in search is an opaque black-box priced per-token. Vendor aggregators (Brave / Exa / Tavily / You.com / Valyu / Perplexity) are pay-per-query with little architectural control and costs that compound fast at agent scale.

Zetesis takes a different shape:

• Free-first routing across free academic and reference APIs (Semantic Scholar, arXiv, OpenAlex, Crossref, PubMed, Wikipedia). Tier 0 is the default route. Provider adapters are planned.
• Paid use is opt-in. Paid providers are disabled until an operator configures them and a reservation authorizes the spend. A Tier-0 miss never enables paid use, and there is no automatic paid fallback. The durable, identity-bound reservation ledger is tracked by zetesis#47.
• Self-hosted deep inquiry (planned). The local-first research loop calls models only through a model contract the consumer grants. Logismos executes the models. Paid model APIs are not a default route.
• Bounded static acquisition (zetesis#48). Zetesis owns anonymous static GET: target and redirect validation, bounded transfer and decoding, static text extraction, and a versioned evidence envelope with replay. Consumer pinning is Phase 01 S3.
• Cited + structured output always. No synthesis without source provenance. Landed: a ResultHit cannot be constructed or decoded without at least one citation.
• Cache with per-provider freshness windows (planned). The storage primitive is not selected yet.

Architecture

Crate	Landed	Planned
zetesis	Facade re-exporting the sylloge surface; steelman and briefing aliases for the two reserved crates	CLI, daemon binary, consumer adapter wiring
sylloge	Provider and DeepResearch traits; SearchConstraints with the fail-closed network-target check and non-forgeable ValidatedTarget; StaticAcquirer (anonymous static GET with per-hop validation, the Connector seam, bounded gzip/deflate decoding, static text extraction, and evidence envelope v1 with fingerprint and replay); citation, result, freshness, cost, and budget types; in-memory LocalDeepResearch with an offline loop fixture	Tier-0 provider adapters, routing, durable reservation ledger, cache, deep-inquiry loop against a model contract
elenkhos	Reserved crate boundary (marker type)	Retrospective steel-manning engine
synopsis	Reserved crate boundary (marker type)	Briefing synthesizer

Zetesis depends on no consumer. Consumers pin a merged Zetesis commit. Logismos, Tropos, and Kanon are reached through service or registration contracts, not Cargo dependencies. See the ownership table in the contract baseline.

Consumer map

• aletheia - planned nous-agent research adapter
• dioptron - planned static-acquisition consumer adapter for the sovereign web runtime
• akroasis - planned broader OSINT public-source research consumer

Non-goals

• Not a conversational search UI (consumer concern).
• Not a browser. Zetesis owns anonymous, bounded static acquisition and does not delegate it to an external extraction service. Dioptron owns sessions, rendering, scripted browsing, and browser actions, and stores the Zetesis evidence envelope verbatim.
• Not a recursive crawler. There is no link-following loop.
• Not a model runtime. Deep-inquiry model calls go through a consumer-granted model contract and Logismos executes them. Zetesis never selects a host or switches host modes. Tropos owns host modes.
• Not a knowledge store or admission authority. Zetesis emits cited candidates, and consumers decide what becomes a fact.
• Not a vector store (that is heurēma).
• Not a credentials manager. The operator vault or consumer owns credential values. Zetesis handles references only.

Development

This README records purpose, boundaries, consumer map, and crate shape. It does not duplicate the live roadmap. Local gate commands are in AGENTS.md.

Design Notes

• Contract baseline - public API inventory (enforced versus convention), API delta, contract ownership, identity and idempotency, evidence envelope v1, resource dimensions, cancellation, error classification, and storage.
• Static acquisition producer release - the merged revision consumers pin, evidence schema and extractor versions, conformance fixtures with their digests, the compatibility evidence a consumer records, and upgrade and rollback.
• Consumer contracts - Phase 00 S2 freeze of the producer contract for tool-hosting consumers, the Dioptron static-acquisition handoff, producer design corrections, coverage, and the facts still needed from Akroasis, inference, and Kanon owners.
• Multi-signal classifiers - required evidence record shape for classifier designs that combine weighted signals before export.
• Deep research provider decision - Phase 05 decision to vendor the local-deep-researcher loop pattern, treat the gpt-researcher vllm_openai adapter shape as prior art, and reject open_deep_research as the default contract.

License

• Code and tooling: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0.
• Documentation: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Repository Metadata

• Registry name: zetesis
• Description: Kanon-managed forkwright repository zetesis.
• Forge repo: forkwright/zetesis
• Kanon prefix: ze
• Config source: workflow/kanon.toml [projects.zetesis]
• Planning state: projects/zetesis/STATE.md
• Last state update: 2026-05-25

Run kanon docs sync --check --repo zetesis to verify this generated section and kanon docs sync --apply --repo zetesis to refresh it.

Blast zone

• Paths explicitly named by the rendered prompt, role, or template input.

Acceptance verifier

kanon gate