Finished standalone execution engine for deterministic, policy-gated, evidence-driven agent work.

TBE v1.0.0 marks the first finished product release of Thread-Based Engineering as a standalone deterministic execution engine for policy-gated, evidence-driven agent work.

TBE is built for one specific problem: letting agents perform bounded work with real guardrails, real evidence, and replayable outcomes instead of opaque side effects and chat logs.

What TBE is

TBE provides a deterministic execution model around thread documents with:

• plan
• dry-run
• run
• replay
• export

It supports:

• deterministic built-in step execution
• policy-gated effects
• policy profiles
• content-addressed evidence artifacts
• replay with evidence reuse
• exec governance with argv prefix enforcement
• artifact registry with named references

What is stable in v1.0.0

The v1.0.0 release freezes the product surface and compatibility contract for the current engine.

Stable command surface:

• tbe init
• tbe validate
• tbe status
• tbe export
• tbe replay
• tbe run
• tbe version
• tbe help

Stable run modes:

• normal execution
• --plan
• --dry-run

Stable schema identifiers:

• cli-session/v0.2
• cli-artifact/v0.2
• cli-step-result/v0.4
• tbe-policy/v0.9

Stable compatibility expectations are documented in COMPATIBILITY.md.

Included in this release

• Product-grade README focused on the engine as the primary product
• Installation guide
• Compatibility contract
• Changelog
• Release checklist
• Apache-2.0 license
• Canonical workflow examples
• Golden contract tests for stable JSON outputs

Canonical workflow coverage includes:

1. Safe repo content generation
2. Controlled exec workflow with command rules
3. Named artifact pipeline with deterministic replay

Why v1.0.0 now

TBE is releasing as v1.0.0 now because the engine itself is complete enough to stand on its own:

• it can plan work before execution
• it can simulate effects safely
• it can execute bounded work under policy
• it can record evidence for what happened
• it can replay prior sessions and detect drift

This release is about product stability, not feature expansion.

What TBE is not

TBE is not:

• a full agent runtime
• a UI product
• a plugin platform
• a network orchestration system
• a branching workflow engine

The repository still contains schemas and spec documents, but the primary product identity is the execution engine.

Upgrade and compatibility notes

• Public-facing version surfaces now report 1.0.0
• Default workspace config version written by tbe init is updated to 1.0.0
• Policy schema remains tbe-policy/v0.9
• Existing policy loading remains backward-compatible where supported by the current implementation
• Contract tests now guard stable JSON output shapes for:
  • validate
  • status
  • export
  • run
  • run --plan
  • run --dry-run
  • replay

Quick start

Build:

bash make build

Initialize workspace:

./bin/tbe init

Run a canonical workflow:

./bin/tbe run --thread examples/wf1-safe-content-generation/thread.json --plan --json
./bin/tbe run --thread examples/wf1-safe-content-generation/thread.json --dry-run --json
./bin/tbe run --thread examples/wf1-safe-content-generation/thread.json --json

Replay a session:

./bin/tbe replay --session .tbe/sessions/<session-file>.json --json

Bottom line

TBE v1.0.0 is a finished standalone execution engine for deterministic, policy-gated, evidence-driven agent work.

It can stand alone today, and it can also be embedded into larger agent systems later.