Show HN: I'm 15. I mass published 134K lines to hold AI agents accountable

by nobulexdev • 5 months ago

6 23 5 months ago

nobulexdev10• 5 months ago

I am 15 (sophomore in high school). I have been building Nobulex for the past several months, including 60 npm packages, 134K lines of TypeScript and 6,115 tests.

The problem: AI agents are making real decisions for loans, trades, hiring, diagnostics with zero cryptographic proof of what they have done or whether they followed any rules. The EU AI Act requires tamper-evident audit trails by August 2026. Nobody has infrastructure for this.

Nobulex is three things:

Agents will be able to sign behavioral covenants before they act (cryptographic commitments — "I will not do X")

Middleware enforces those covenants at runtime as violations are blocked before execution

Every action is logged in a hash-chained, merkle-tree audit trail that anyone can use and verify independently

The quickstart is 3 lines: const { protect } = require('@nobulex/sdk'); const agent = await protect({ name: 'my-agent', rules: ['no-data-leak', 'read-only'] });

npm install @nobulex/sdk

Everything is MIT licensed and on npm under @nobulex/*. Site: https://nobulex.com

Would love feedback on the architecture, the covenant model, or anything else. Happy to answer questions.

mlyle5• 5 months ago

It looks almost entirely envisioned and implemented by AI.

An agent signing a covenant doesn't do anything. You're not going to enforce a contract against it, and there's not some kind of non-repudiation problem to solve.

Enforcing behavioral covenants or boundaries is inherent to how you make things safe. But how do you really do it for anything that matters? How do you make sure that an agent isn't discriminating based on race or other factors?

The whole reason you're using an LLM is because you're doing something either:

A) at very low scale, at which case it's hard to capture sufficient covenants cost-efficiently

or B) with very great complexity, where the behavior you want is hard to encapsulate in code-- in which case meaningful enforcement of the complex covenants that may result is hard.

Indeed, if you could just write code to do it, you'd just write code to do it.

I'm glad you're interested in these issues and playing with them. I'll leave you with one last thought: 134 KSLOC is a bug, not a feature. Some software systems that need to be huge, but for software systems that need to be trusted-- small, auditable, and understandable to humans (and agents) is the key thing you're looking for. Could you build some kind of small trustable core that solves a simple problem in an understandable way?

nobulexdev10• 5 months ago

You're right with the 134K point. The actual cryptographic kernel (covenant building, verification, hash-chaining) is just about 3-4K lines. The rest are just adapters, plugins and test harnesses. I should lead with that number. With enforcement, the covenant itself isn't the enforcement. Middleware intercepts tool calls before the execution and blocks the violations. But you're right that this only works for constraints you can express as rules. "No external calls" and "rate limit 100/hour" are enforceable. "Don't discriminate" is not — that's a fundamentally harder problem and I'm not pretending that it solves it. The small trustable core advice is truly good and probably what I should focus on next. Thank you.

mtmail• 5 months ago

You also published all strategy documents, all internal project plans, even the marketing/adoption plan.

https://github.com/nobulexdev/nobulex/blob/main/docs/crisis-...

"HN Posting Notes

Internal only. Delete before posting.

When posting UNCOVENANTED-AGENT-PROBLEM-HN.md:

    Post on Tuesday or Wednesday, 8-9am EST
    Title is just: "The Uncovenanted Agent Problem"
    Replace [GitHub link] with actual repo URL when live under Kova name
    First comment should be from you: brief context on who you are and why you built this
    Respond to EVERY comment in the first 6 hours
    Don't be defensive. Thank critics. Ask follow-up questions.
    If someone finds a real flaw, acknowledge it publicly and say you'll address it
    DO NOT mention your age unless directly asked. Let the work speak.

DO NOT mention your age unless directly asked. Let the work speak.

I'd agree. Why does the age matter.

nobulexdev10• 5 months ago

Fair catch. Those are internal notes from all of my earlier iterations of the project. I should have cleaned the docs folder before pushing to a new repo. Removing them now. On the age thing: those notes have been written when I was just planning to let the work stand on its own. I had decided to include it because I figured being upfront is better than people finding out later and feeling misled. Either way, the code is the code — 134K lines, 6,115 tests, all on npm. Judge it on that.

ekianjo• 5 months ago

HN loves the idea of kid geniuses

crtasm• 5 months ago

it's OK, the commit "remove internal strategy docs" has definitely removed them

a-dub2• 5 months ago

if you have pre-execution enforcement, what's the point of the verification protocol? the ability to apply stricter covenants to past action logs after the fact? i'm not sure i follow the use-case for that.

nobulexdev10• 5 months ago

Good question.

The Enforcement and verification serve for a different audience.

Enforcement will protect you as it stops your agent from doing something it shouldn't. Verification protects everyone else, as it lets a third party independently confirm that the enforcement actually happened, without trusting you. You say "my agent followed the rules," while the regulator says "prove it." The hash-chained logs and signed covenants are the proof. Without verification, it's just your word.

a-dub2• 5 months ago

makes sense. the core modules that i looked at look pretty good. (action-log, verifier, composability, dsl and parser).

all the kitchen sink stuff makes it pretty intense though. have you considered separating out just the core execution, logging and verification components? stuff like c2pa seems super cool, but maybe a second layer for application type things like that so that the core consensus stuff can be inspected easily? one goal for a system like this is easy auditability of the system itself.

adamtaylor_132• 5 months ago

How is this different from building a CLI tool that allows/disallows certain behaviors?

For example, I have a Gmail CLI that just wraps the Gmail API and I specifically give AI certain powers and withhold other abilities. I log every action taken.

Is this a meta framework for this or an NPM package that does something like that?

nobulexdev10• 5 months ago

Your Gmail CLI is doing the right thing with manually restricting what the agent will be able to do and logging actions. Nobulex is more of the generalized version of that pattern.

The difference: your CLI controls one agent on one tool with rules you have hardcoded. Nobulex gives you signed, immutable constraints that third parties can verify independently. The logs are hash-chained so nobody (including you) can tamper with them after the fact. And the constraints are the cryptographically bound to the agent's identity.

If you are truly the only one who needs to trust your agent, your approach works fine. Nobulex matters when someone else needs to verify what your agent has done, a regulator, a customer and a counterparty.

adamtaylor_132• 5 months ago

Very interesting! I see I have much to learn in this arena. Thanks for explaining!

csense• 5 months ago

An AI agent is doing some actions. Those actions must comply with "controls" like 'ALLOW transfer ON treasury WHERE amount <= 10000 AND currency = "USDC"' and provide public, auditable proof that actions complied with the spec. The action log seems to be verifiable via ZK proofs.

What's the application here? If you want to enforce that an agent's blockchain transactions follow some deterministic conditions, why not just give it access to a command-line tool (MCP / skill / whatever) that enforces your conditions?

If you want auditing of the agent's blockchain actions to be public, why not just make all your agent's actions go through an ordinary smart contract?

I don't mean to kill your enthusiasm for programming or AI. But this project...I'm sorry, but this project just isn't good. It's an over-engineered, vibe-coded "solution" in search of a problem.

This project is about a month old. I highly doubt one person produced 134 kloc in that time. I'm pretty sure a lot of it is vendorized dependencies and AI-generated code that's had minimal human review. Much of the documentation appears to be AI-generated as well.

nobulexdev10• 5 months ago

On "why not a CLI tool / smart contract,” for single-agent, single-system setups, you are completely right. Nobulex is for when a third party has to verify compliance independently across systems. But the current examples don't make that clear enough. On the code, yes, heavily AI-assisted. I designed the architecture, AI helped implement it. I am 15 and in school, no team. The project has been through many iterations over several months, not one month. On "solution in search of a problem,” maybe. What would you consider worth solving in this space?

nobulexdev10• 5 months ago

Based off of all the feedback here, I have built a quick demo that shows the multi-party use case on why cryptography matters when a third party needs to verify compliance independently:

https://github.com/nobulexdev/nobulex/blob/main/demo/two-par...

Run it: npx tsx demo/two-party-verify.ts

Three steps: operator creates a covenant, claims compliance and then a regulator verifies the cryptographic proof without trusting the operator. That is the core of what Nobulex does. Everything else is tooling around this pattern. Appreciate the pushback, as it helped clarify what actually matters.

mlyle5• 5 months ago

I have built a quick demo

This is obvs 5 minutes of LLM generated code

a regulator verifies the cryptographic proof without trusting the operator.

No, the regulator verifies that the operator signed the proof, which isn't a lot different from the operator saying it alone.

Show HN: I'm 15. I mass published 134K lines to hold AI agents accountable

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