NILScript

The governed action layer for AI agents. An agent proposes intent; a deterministic kernel is the only thing that commits; an action a backend never declared is unexpressible, not filtered. Composes with MCP. pip install nilscript.

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NILScript Protocol

The constitution of NILScript — the Network Intent Layer (NIL) wire contract, the nilscript DSL grammar, and the SEQRD-PC model.

The standard. The runnable kernel lives at nilscript-org/nilscript.

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This repository is documentation only — the specification text, the constitution, the reading layer. It is not an installable package. Like the OpenAPI, JSON Schema, and MCP specifications, the standard has its own home, separate from the implementations that run it.

Where the machine-readable contract lives: the canonical JSON schemas, the DSL schema, and the conformance vectors ship inside the kernel package (nilscript), where they are read offline via importlib.resources — they are the enforced contract = code, not prose. This repo renders and references them; it never forks them. See the extraction plan §7.1.

The two halves

	What	Where
NILScript Protocol (this repo)	The constitution — NIL narratives, the DSL grammar guides, SEQRD-PC, governance.	nilscript-protocol (docs)
NILScript (the kernel)	The installable, headless execution engine + SDK + CLI + canonical JSON schemas.	nilscript (pip install nilscript)

Map

NIL — the Network Intent Layer (nil/)

The wire contract: how an agent proposes an action, how a backend answers, the envelope, grants, refusals, rollback, and per-domain profiles. Seven performatives (SEQRD-PC: STATUS · EVENT · QUERY · ROLLBACK · DECIDE · PROPOSE · COMMIT).

• nil/0.2.0.md — the current spec (v0.2)
• nil/0.1.0.md — the foundation
• nil/0.1.0-hosted-profile.md · nil/0.1.0-conformance-checklist.md · nil/0.2.0-calibration-appendix.md

nilscript DSL — the orchestration language (dsl/)

A declarative, JSON-based, LLM-native language one layer above NIL: an agent writes a program, a static validator admits it, a runtime executes it. Start at dsl/00-INDEX.md. Key chapters: grammar, validation & types, execution model, the runtime explained.

Profile registry (registry/)

The verb catalogs per domain: commerce-v1 · services-v1.

Governance (governance/)

GOVERNANCE.md (the Steward / Reference-Implementation rule) · VERSIONING.md · CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.

Using the standard

• Run it: pip install nilscript → nilscript run plan.nil.json --adapter-url <shim> (the kernel).
• Build an adapter: start from nil-adapter-template.
• Implement an SDK in another language: read the JSON schemas in the kernel's nil/ and dsl/ — no per-language package is reserved.

License

Specification text: CC BY 4.0. Schemas / vectors / code (in the kernel): Apache 2.0.

Citation

This repository is the specification of the NIL (Network Intent Layer) framework, described in a published paper archived on Zenodo with a permanent DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20774491.

@misc{elkhider2026nil,
  title  = {Unexpressible, Not Filtered: A Structural Framework for Governing AI-Agent Actions --- the Network Intent Layer},
  author = {Elkhider, ElBasheir A. M.},
  year   = {2026},
  doi    = {10.5281/zenodo.20774491},
  url    = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20774491}
}