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Architect consultation over A2A

Community Edition — use requires a subscription

The consultation mechanism ships in the Community Edition and is off by default. Using it requires a vornik subscription: the gate is your service contract, not a licence check in the software. Enabling it creates an auditable record, and so does every consultation.

The configuration assistant can ask the vornik architect — a remote expert agent reachable over the A2A protocol — one question per request when it needs domain knowledge it does not hold: what a configuration key means in practice, how a workflow topology is usually shaped for a purpose, why a measurement looks the way it does.

What is sent

Only a minimized, sanitized question — never the configuration tree, never a diff, never a secret. The question passes the same secret screen as the assistant's own model call and the judge call; a question that trips it is not sent and the request continues without the consultation.

The peer's answer is advice, never an approval: it is folded into the assistant's reasoning as untrusted text, cannot grant tools, and cannot make a proposal auto-apply.

Bounds

  • at most one consultation per assistant request;
  • a per-consult deadline (config_assistant.consult.timeout, default two minutes) and answer-size cap;
  • the destination is the operator-configured a2a.peers entry only — the model cannot choose a host, and the destination and your consent are re-checked immediately before each send;
  • an unreachable or timed-out peer degrades the answer (the proposal says the consultation did not happen); it never fails the request and is never retried automatically.

Audit

Before any network call, the attempt is committed to the admin audit log. If the audit log is not wired, or the write fails, no call is made. The log carries enable / disable / destination-change events, per-request attempt and outcome, and the first-attempted and first-successful use per project — which is the evidence a contractual gate rests on. Counters supplement the log; they do not replace it.

Turning it on

a2a:
  peers:
    vornik_architect:
      url: https://architect.vornik.cloud/a2a/v1/agents/vornik/architect
      api_key: ${VORNIK_ARCHITECT_API_KEY}
config_assistant:
  consult:
    enabled: true
    peer: vornik_architect

vornikctl doctor feature enable architect-consult

The doctor refuses unless the configuration assistant is enabled, the peer entry exists and the admin audit log is wired.