Layer 1 of 12·Slice: Human and intent surface·No dedicated platform

Scope of this page. Reference material for the Human Interface layer: what it owns, what it must not own, and how Synedrix OS implements it today. It is descriptive, not normative — where this page and the Layer Taxonomy Table disagree, the taxonomy table wins.

What this layer is

Human Interface is the layer where a person meets the system: it captures human intent, carries approval requests to a reviewer and back, and gives operators a surface to watch what a governed multi-agent system is doing. In practice this means dashboards, admin panels, operator-facing APIs, and any command UI through which a human starts, reviews, or blocks a piece of work — not the workflow logic that acts on what the human decides, and not the policy logic that decides whether an approval is even required.

Because Synedrix OS is domain-agnostic at its core, this layer stays generic on purpose: it renders and routes intent and decisions, it does not interpret them. The moment a human’s click or form submission needs to be turned into a task graph, a policy check, or a piece of durable state, responsibility passes to Orchestration (Layer 3) and, from there, to Governance & Controls (Layer 9). Human Interface is the surface those layers are reachable through, not a decision-maker in its own right.

flowchart LR
  n1([Human Interface]):::term
  subgraph What it owns
    n2[Dashboards]:::agent
    n3[Admin panels]:::agent
    n4[Operator APIs]:::agent
    n5[Approval surfaces]:::agent
    n6[Command UIs]:::agent
  end
  n1 --> n2
  subgraph What it must not own
    n7[Domain logic execution]:::warn
    n8[Domain Pack Layer]:::term
    n7 --> n8
    n9[Tool adapters]:::warn
    n10[Tool Abstraction Layer]:::term
    n9 --> n10
    n11[Memory internals]:::warn
    n12[Memory Data Layer]:::term
    n11 --> n12
  end
  n1 --> n7
  subgraph Interfaces with
    n13[Orchestration]:::check
    n14[Observability]:::check
    n15[Governance]:::check
  end
  n1 --> n13

What it owns

Per the Layer Taxonomy Table, Human Interface owns the surfaces a human uses to express intent or exercise oversight — not the mechanisms behind them. Concretely, that means:

  • Dashboards
  • Admin panels
  • Operator APIs
  • Approval surfaces
  • Command UIs

What it must not own

This layer renders and routes; it does not execute, adapt, or persist. The taxonomy table draws that line explicitly, and the corresponding capability lives one or more layers away rather than here.

ConcernCorrect owner
Domain logic executionDomain Pack Layer
Tool adaptersTool Abstraction Layer
Memory internalsMemory & Data Layer

Interfaces with

Human Interface does not stand alone — every surface it presents is a window onto work happening elsewhere, so it interfaces with three layers to stay coherent with what the rest of the system is doing:

  • Orchestration — a human-initiated action (starting a workflow, submitting an approval decision) has to be handed to Layer 3 as a routed, sequenced step; the interface layer does not decompose or schedule work itself.
  • Observability — dashboards and operator panels are consumers of Layer 10’s logs, traces, and metrics; the interface layer displays execution health, it does not compute or store it.
  • Governance — approval surfaces exist because Layer 9 requires a human decision at some checkpoint; the interface layer is the channel that decision travels through, not the authority that decided a checkpoint was needed.

Current specification depth

Current specification depth. Unlike most other layers, Human Interface has no dedicated deep-dive canonical spec in this repository — the authoritative source is the one-line row in the Layer Taxonomy Table, echoed by one-liners in README §3.1 and the consolidated master §4. Orchestration (Layer 3) and Governance & Controls (Layer 9) currently absorb most of the adjacent detail that a reader might expect to find here: approval routing mechanics live in the Orchestration & Runtime Strategy and in the HITL Gateway Agent’s definition in the Agent Registry, not in a Human Interface spec. Treat this page as the honest current state of specification depth, not as a substitute for a deep-dive that has not yet been written.

OS agents at this layer

No OS-owned agent operates natively at this layer. Human Interface is realized through UI/API/messaging surfaces that call into Layer 3 (Orchestration); governed human-decision points — for example the HITL Gateway Agent (os-agt-004) — sit at Layer 9 (Governance & Controls), adjacent to but distinct from this layer. Per the Agent Registry, the twelve OS agents are assigned only to Layers 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, and 10.

Layer principles that apply

Two of the taxonomy table’s layer principles bear directly on this layer:

  • 1. Shared before specific — a dashboard, admin panel, or approval surface built for one domain pack’s needs should still be a reusable OS-layer capability wherever the underlying concern (rendering an approval, showing execution status) is not actually domain-specific.
  • 2. Controls before execution — an approval surface exists to route a human decision into governance, not to let a human bypass it; the interface layer must not become a shortcut around Layer 9’s checks.

Synedrix OS · Layer reference · Human Interface