Sequence · 03 of 10 · Golden path contract

Golden path as a contract: discover, invoke, verify

The agent never grades its own work. The path ships its own verifier, and a failure comes back as a rule id and a fix hint the agent can act on.

Golden path as a contract: discover, invoke, verify Sequence diagram of an agent discovering a golden path in the catalog, invoking it with typed inputs on the platform API, then calling the verifier, which either returns a rule id and fix hint for a retry or returns signed evidence of success. ALT[gate fails · retry ≤ 3][all gates pass]DISCOVERSCHEMA + VERIFY CONTRACTINVOKE · TYPED INPUTSRUN IDVERIFY(RUN ID)RULE ID + FIX HINTRE-INVOKE WITH FIXPASS + SIGNED EVIDENCECoding agentClaude Code · CursorGolden-path catalogtyped XRD schemasPlatform APIXRs · ArgoCDVerifierdeterministic gatesLEGENDCallReturnHeadline successJudge of record

Requirement

Golden paths become machine-executable contracts, not wiki pages. An agent has to be able to discover them, invoke them, and verify the result.

Design choices

  • One catalog feeds Backstage for humans and MCP for agents.
  • Every path declares preconditions and a verify contract: XR Ready, Argo Healthy, signature checks out, SLO burn under threshold.
  • Retry budget of three, then a human is paged with the evidence.

Evidence and gap

Built in Hangar: typed airframe XRDs, the Backstage scaffolder, release verification with cosign and Rekor. Proposal only: an MCP discovery endpoint over the same catalog.

Hangar · reference architecture