How it works
In development
Scythian is being built to run beside the Omphalos gateway in your own deployment. It will read the figures Omphalos computes for each reader, and never the content behind them.
How Scythian connects
Scythian will call Omphalos’s HTTP door like any other app, and get figures back computed for the person reading them.
Your Omphalos deployment
Nothing per person crosses this line.Scythian gets no database role, no vendor keys and no BI tool.
Each will be a named identity in Omphalos, with its own grant and its own audit rows.
It will register as a person-app, like any other app on the node. A reader signs in as themselves, and every figure is computed for them at read time, so two people can see two different, correct pages.
A service principal holding an aggregate grant. It will write each month’s report into the deployment, so a stored report clears the same floors as a live page.
Five families are written into Omphalos’s law today, each over fixed 30-day windows. More are designed.
| Family | What it counts | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Adoption | Who uses AI tools, by tool, client, department and week | In the law |
| Usage | How much AI tools are used, by client and department | In the law |
| Outcomes | Drafts confirmed or rejected, edits accepted, pull requests, tickets resolved, documents published | In the law |
| Retrieval quality | Whether answers were given, suggested or held back, by kind of source | In the law |
| Knowledge gaps | Questions that found no grounded answer | In the law |
| And more | Governed share, grounding, answer quality, agents, cost, governance, freshness and health | Designed |
“In the law” means the rules for each family are built and tested in Omphalos. No door serves them yet; that is Scythian’s first release.
Scythian is designed to hold as little as it can.
Message text, documents, keystrokes, screens, emotion or off-duty use. No machine-learned inputs.
DesignedPer-person figures and stored reports stay in your deployment. Group figures leave only if your contract opts in, which is planned for benchmarks.
DesignedNo database role: Omphalos’s store refuses one. No vendor credentials, and no BI tool inside the deployment.
Refusal builtIn the code
From Omphalos’s permission law, store and tests as they stand today. Trimmed where marked, never changed.
/**
* Minimum number of distinct people who must stand behind a number before it
* can be printed. Below this a "department" statistic is one person's diary.
*
* Five, not three: with k=3 a reader who knows two of the three contributors
* (trivial in a small department) subtracts them and recovers the third.
*/
export const MIN_COHORT = 5;
/** A figure derived from content (topic counts, gap clusters) needs this many people (AG-5). */
export const CONTENT_FLOOR = 10;
// …
export function resolveMinCohort(requested?: number | null): number {
if (requested === undefined || requested === null || !Number.isFinite(requested)) return MIN_COHORT;
return Math.max(MIN_COHORT, Math.floor(requested));
}describe('decideFamily: who may view a metric family (the law spec, 4.8)', () => {
// …
it('6. a live K12 admits its person, a member of its group or department, or its service', () => {
// …
const e = aggregate('e1', 'f_eng_adoption', [P('sam'), D('sales'), S('scythian')]);
// …
expect(verdict(view({ subject: service('scythian'), edges: [e] }))).toBe('allow');
expect(verdict(view({ subject: person('bob') }))).toBe('no-path');
});export async function openServiceStore(role: ServiceRole, backend: Backend): Promise<ServiceStore> {
if (!isServiceRole(role)) throw new StoreError('refused', `${String(role)} is not a service role; the egress service and Scythian have none`);
// …Setup
Scythian always needs an Omphalos deployment, and enterprise Duit runs on one. Every step below is planned.
Enterprise Duit runs on an Omphalos deployment, so the node Scythian needs is already there.
Add Scythian to the deployment Duit runs on.
PlannedRegister it as a person-app and choose who may view which figures.
PlannedDuit’s own activity feeds Scythian.
Planned: laterYou run Omphalos in your own cloud. Scythian runs beside its gateway.
Run Scythian’s own image next to the gateway.
PlannedRegister it as a person-app and choose who may view which figures.
PlannedStart from the door’s own record. One vendor-analytics importer, metadata only, comes later.
Planned: laterNot for standalone or solo Duit. The floors need at least five people, so Scythian is built for teams and companies, not one person on one computer.
Tell us what your teams need to see. Scythian is in development, and early conversations shape it.