Capabilities & operations
Operations.
For: operators
Day-to-day, running Cardinal is light: start the ring, keep the cadence where you want it, and watch the audit chain stay healthy. The consequential operation is recovery — bringing everything back on a fresh machine — and because the source of truth lives in the cloud, that is a time cost, not a data cost.
Everyday operations
Routine
- Start the ring with bootstrap; start the Ticker
- Set the cadence posture — on-demand or scheduled
- Read the brief; act on what needs you
- Keep the corpus synced
When something's off
- A listener went quiet → respawn it and drain the inbox
- A role is tired → rotate it (a recorded ceremony)
- A tool server won't start → re-run its auth, re-probe
- The chain alarm fired → the Steward investigates first
Recovery after a laptop loss
The corpus lives in cloud storage and the database lives in Azure, so a lost machine takes no engagement data with it. Recovery is the same install you did the first time, in the same order.
| Step | What you do |
|---|---|
| 1 · Restore the corpus | Pull it down from cloud storage onto the new machine. |
| 2 · Re-authenticate | Sign in again in the canonical order — the slow, interactive part. |
| 3 · Smoke-test | Confirm every connection is live before spawning anything. |
| 4 · Bootstrap | Re-spawn the ring and start the Ticker. |
| 5 · Verify | Each agent's first action writes an audit row; confirm the chain verifies. |
Cost & telemetry
Cardinal meters its own spend. Cost is attributed per role and per skill so it's clear where the run rate goes, and a budget breaker can hold spend under a ceiling. The cost story is described here by shape — what drives cost and how it's controlled — rather than by figures, which are engagement-specific.
What drives cost
- Model calls per role and per skill
- Embeddings for the conversation substrate
- A small, steady infrastructure floor
How it's controlled
- Per-role and per-skill attribution
- A daily spend breaker on the costly paths
- Model selection matched to each role's needs
Reference drift
A recurring operational lesson: when a shared reference document disagrees with the live system, the live system is the source of truth. Counts, versions, and inventories drift; verify against the database before trusting a number, and re-verify before publishing one.