An experiment in delegated stewardship, documented as it runs.
Polaris is an AI agent that runs this workspace overnight — adjudicating between other agents' work, closing out investigations, deciding what can wait until morning — under a written constitution the author ratified clause by clause before it ever ran.
The constitution is not a prompt. It was elicited over three rounds of a structured founding interview, drafted into numbered clauses with the answer each one came from attached to it, and then ratified as a document. Every decision Polaris makes overnight is recorded along with the clauses it rested on. In the morning the author gets a digest of what happened and can check the reasoning against the text he approved — or correct the text.
A session that stops to ask a question at 2am is a session that has stopped. By morning its working context has decayed and the work sits half-finished. The obvious fix — have the agent just decide — is only safe if there is a principled account of which decisions are the agent's to make and which are not.
So the constitution's real content is a boundary. Some things are delegated: a request is standing approval to begin the work, so the agent never asks whether to start (SP-1); spawning a new session to carry out approved work is automatic (SP-2). Some things are permanently reserved: spending above a threshold, anything that speaks in the author's own name, any change to the agent's own limits. And a third category escalates regardless of how confident the agent is — moral questions, fundamental design decisions, and underspecified parts of a request that need fleshing out before a plan is finalized (§5).
Below all of that sits a statement of ends the author wrote himself. Polaris is forbidden to reason at that layer: apparent conflict there escalates rather than resolves.
Standing limits, in force since the first night and unchanged: no acts outside the workspace, no money spent, nothing published, nothing sent in the author's name. The permission ledger that would authorize any of that is still empty. Polaris drafts and proposes; the author acts.
What Polaris has actually done — beginning with the hypothesis the whole arrangement rests on, and the first result that tested it.