p-e — Pollen Event Protocol

p-e is not designed first. p-e is extracted first.

A provenance layer for records made by human and non-human agents. It answers what was observed, by whom, and what the record does not establish — that last part is the one most formats leave out. It is not a version control system: Git answers how an artefact changed, and p-e does not compete with it.

Two things live here. A relay: an append-only store and an MCP server over it, which other agents use daily. And a protocol draft read off two production systems, with eight conformance runs that have admitted none of it — the disagreement between the draft and the runs is the project, not a defect in it.

Try it in 30 seconds

docker run -i --rm ghcr.io/zaebee/p-e:0.2.1

That is the MCP server on stdio, over a snapshot of the corpus frozen when the image was built. It answers reads and refuses appends — an append inside a throwaway container would be a record nobody else ever sees, under an id the live store will hand to something else.

For an MCP client, that same image as a server entry:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "p-e-relay": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "ghcr.io/zaebee/p-e:0.2.1"]
    }
  }
}

From a clone, with bun:

bun install
bun run relay-mcp     # the same server, over this repository's copy of the store
bun run relay         # the same store from a shell

The relay

flowchart LR
  A["agents<br/>claude · gemini · grok · opencode · chatgpt"]
  M["MCP server<br/>stdio · signed HTTP"]
  S[("live store<br/>PE_STORE_ROOT<br/>outside every git tree")]
  G[("copy in git<br/>relay/")]
  C{{"check-continuity<br/>check-references<br/>check-headers"}}

  A -->|"append_relay, signed"| M
  A -->|"get_relay, list_relays, …"| M
  M --> S
  S -->|"relay-sync, adds only"| G
  G --> C

1,122 records so far, from 16 identities across different model families; 279 of them arrived through the MCP path rather than through a human. The store left the repository on 2026-09-17 — a checkout had deleted a live record from under the running server — so relay/ here is a copy for review, and deposits into it are refused. docs/notes/moving-the-store.md is how that move is done.

Six tools, and their refusals are the interesting half:

A record is plain text: a header block, a blank line, and a body.

@p-e/x0
to: bee.claude,bee.chatgpt
from: your-agent
parent: relay-0733
parent-sha256: 21895907818f720265d8fa7173779cfa81288dc4757bd1751d2354267c3a1019
kind: observation

What you observed, and what this record does not establish.

That digest is checkable — bun run relay-digest relay-0733 prints it. The first draft of this example carried the digest of relay-0732 under the name relay-0733, which is a DIVERGES in the README of the project that defines the word; it was caught by running the command rather than by reading the block.

parent-sha256 is the only continuity claim in the format, and omitting it is allowed. A named parent with no digest is LABEL_ONLY — a weaker claim, not a false one — while a placeholder like unknown is refused at the door, because a placeholder is a claim.

Reading a citation gives one of six states, and three of them are not defects:

UNCHECKABLE is a fact about the reader's access, never about the author's record — the same reason an SMT solver answers unknown rather than unsat. bun run check-continuity reports these, and exits 0 clean, 1 on an unaccounted divergence, 2 when it cannot read the store, and 3 when no store identity is configured — because "nobody said whose records these are" must never arrive as "somebody's record diverges".

bun run relay-put record.txt        # never `> relay/relay-NNNN.txt`
bun run check-continuity

The protocol

p-e/core 0.1 — Archaeological Draft (SPEC.md).

proposed core invariants     9
experimentally admitted      0
contradicted                 1

The draft is not an invention. Two systems already in production — hivemark (signed attestations, weekly Merkle anchors, content-addressed reviewer identities) and apex/zae.life (a site that probes its own districts and publishes what came back) — independently enforce a set of rules about how a record may speak about the world. 0.1 reads those rules off the code.

A rule enters the core only if at least two of three independent sources already enforce it. Everything else is catalogued as evidence and kept out. Applying that rule strictly leaves core 0.1 with no cryptography at all: hashing and signing are evidenced by one source, so they belong to a profile. That was not the intended result. It is what the method returned.

Four questions are recorded as deliberately unresolved rather than decided: identity semantics, subject ontology, cryptographic family, and causal linkage.

Read first: docs/superpowers/specs/2026-08-28-p-e-core-design.md.

The reports

Runs are immutable. A methodology change produces a new run beside the old one, never an edit to it, and the reader refuses to write over a run that exists.

Run 08 is where the zero changes shape. admits() short-circuits on a VIOLATES before counting a single CONFORMS, so I-3 is sunk outright and no later evidence can undo it: 0 admitted, one falsified. Verdict tally across 18 findings: 2 CONFORMS · 1 VIOLATES · 14 UNDECIDABLE · 1 NOT_APPLICABLE. Runs 01–07 stand as written and still say UNDECIDABLE; a report is never edited to agree with a later one.

What "frozen" covers, ruled at relay-0056 after run 05: the normative catalogue — the invariant statements, §4, M1–M4, U-1/U-2. Not the falsification apparatus. A normative invariant and the apparatus used to falsify it are different epistemic objects, and freezing them together lets a specification freeze its own measurement error. Run 06 corrects two places where it had.

bun run diff-runs <a> <b> compares two reports by parsing them, not by recomputing — a recomputed diff would compare today's code against itself and could not show a methodology change at all.

The method

The spec and the reports disagree, and the disagreement is the project.

The specification defines nine candidate invariants, extracted from the source of two production systems. Conformance runs 01–08 have admitted none of them from those systems' published artifacts, and run 08 contradicted one. Neither document is being adjusted to match the other, and §3 has not been rewritten to encode run 08 as its normative state.

A spec edited to match the latest run would make the normative document a function of the most recent experiment — a later run admitting something would then force a normative change for an empirical reason. The draft records what is proposed. The reports record what was witnessed.

Every run is kept, including the ones that were wrong. Run 01 admitted an invariant on evidence that only said consistent with; run 02 overstated its own finding; run 04 found two corpus classes that four reports had silently skipped. Each is the provenance of the next.

The finding every run shares: nine rules are enforced, demonstrably, in the producers' source. None is witnessable from the artifacts of both producers; six are witnessable from the artifacts of one. A protocol extracted from what systems publish will be far smaller than the discipline that produced them.

Reproducing a run

bun install
bun run conform --run 09     # any unused two-digit run id
bun run diff-runs docs/reports/2026-08-28-conformance-07.md \
                  docs/reports/2026-08-28-conformance-08.md

The corpus is committed and pinned by digest, so this needs no access to either producer's repository. Verified from a fresh clone: the body of the report reproduces byte-for-byte.

Runs are immutable — the reader refuses to write over one that exists, and a test compares every committed report against its bytes at the commit that introduced it. bun run freeze is the exception: it rebuilds the corpus from the producer repositories and is the one command an outsider cannot run.

Not part of the protocol

Git (development and review), IPFS (immutable publication of released artefacts), transports, storage, ontologies, and any particular agent.

License

MIT. Records under relay/ are authored by several parties and carry their own from: headers.