Concepts

NERVE

ekkOS can detect, diagnose, and heal problems in your codebase automatically.

NERVE is the self-healing layer of ekkOS. It monitors your memory system's health, detects anomalies like failing patterns or degraded performance, and takes corrective action — from quarantining bad patterns to rolling back broken deployments. Think of it as an immune system for your codebase.

How It Works

NERVE follows a pipeline — each anomaly flows through a series of stages before any action is taken. Nothing happens without evidence.

1Observe

Continuously monitors your pattern health, success rates, and system metrics

2Detect

Identifies anomalies — declining pattern success, production errors, latency spikes

3Diagnose

Gathers evidence and produces a root-cause analysis with confidence scoring

4Heal

Executes corrective actions — quarantine bad patterns, forge defensive ones, or roll back deployments

5Verify

Checks that the fix worked. If it didn't, the action is reverted and logged

Autonomy Tiers

NERVE has four levels of autonomy. You control how much it can do on its own. Each tier unlocks more powerful actions, with stronger safety guarantees.

R0Observe

Read-only. NERVE detects and diagnoses problems but takes no action. You review everything.

Anomaly detectionRoot-cause diagnosisConfidence signal
R1Memory Healing

NERVE can modify your memory — quarantine failing patterns, retire stale ones, forge defensive patterns from failures.

Pattern quarantinePattern retirementAntibody forgingAnti-pattern detection
R2Code Mutation

NERVE can generate pull requests to fix localized bugs. All changes go through PR review — nothing is auto-merged.

Automated PR generationLocalized bug fixesTest verification before proposing
R3Autonomous Reflex

NERVE can automatically roll back a deployment if it detects an acute post-deploy outage. This is the fastest response — no human in the loop.

Automatic deployment rollbackSub-minute response timeMachine-checkable safety predicates

Dashboard Panels

The NERVE dashboard gives you real-time visibility into what the system is doing. Everything is observable — no black boxes.

Diagnoses

Every anomaly NERVE detects gets a diagnosis with root-cause analysis, confidence score, and recommended actions.

Reflex Arc

Monitors the fast-path rollback system. Shows when reflexes evaluated, fired, or were blocked by safety guards.

Mutation Budget

Daily and weekly caps on autonomous actions. Prevents runaway healing — the system can't exceed its budget.

Dream Forge

Overnight, NERVE recombines patterns from your library to discover cross-domain connections you might have missed.

Antibody Library

Defensive patterns forged from past failures. When NERVE diagnoses a problem, it creates an antibody to prevent recurrence.

Goal Genesis

When the same anomaly triggers repeatedly, NERVE surfaces it as a goal — showing what needs structural improvement.

Safety Guarantees

NERVE is designed with multiple layers of safety. Every action is bounded, auditable, and reversible.

  • Mutation budgetsDaily caps on every action type. The system cannot exceed its budget, even if multiple anomalies fire simultaneously.
  • Confidence thresholdsActions only execute when diagnosis confidence exceeds the tier's threshold. Low-confidence diagnoses are logged for manual review.
  • Single-hop rollbacksThe Reflex Arc only reverts to the immediately previous deployment. No cascading reversions.
  • Previous deployment health checkRollbacks only fire if the previous deployment was confirmed healthy. NERVE won't revert to a known-bad state.
  • Full audit trailEvery decision — including decisions not to act — is recorded with evidence, predicates, and safety check results.
  • Kill switchOne click disables all autonomous actions immediately. The system goes read-only.

Vitals Integration

Connect your observability providers so NERVE can feel production pain — not just memory health.

Sentry
Error tracking
Axiom
Log analytics
Deploy Platform
Deployment events
Datadog
APM

Configure vitals in Dashboard → Settings → Vitals. Without vitals, NERVE monitors memory and session health signals only.

Getting Started

Step 1

Open NERVE

Go to Dashboard → NERVE to see your system's health.

Step 2

Set your tier

Start at R0 (observe only). Upgrade to R1 when you're comfortable with autonomous memory healing.

Step 3

Connect vitals

Add your observability provider so NERVE can detect production issues, not just memory drift.