Gridlace

A Deterministic Dependency Engine for humans and AI agents.

The name evokes points laced into a changing pattern: move one declared relation and the consequences across the structure change. It is an image, not a claim that the engine uses a regular grid or provides a graph editor.

It answers five questions over relations you declare:

• Is this dependency graph valid and acyclic?
• What remains before these targets can be completed?
• What can run now and in which parallel layers?
• What will these changes affect?
• Why is this target blocked or affected?

The engine proves derivations over declared relations. It does not prove that the declared business relations are true.

This repository is deliberately limited to dependency reasoning. It is not a general orchestration standard, provider-selection framework, task runner, graph discovery system, graph database, or visual graph editor.

Graph contract

{
  "schema": "agent-deps/v1",
  "nodes": [
    { "id": "schema" },
    { "id": "backend" },
    { "id": "release" }
  ],
  "requires": [
    { "dependent": "backend", "prerequisite": "schema" },
    { "dependent": "release", "prerequisite": "backend" }
  ]
}

Public edges never use ambiguous from / to keys.

Develop

Use Node.js 22 or newer.

This repository is the public source distribution. It is not currently published to the npm registry.

npm ci
npm run check
npm run start:ui

After npm run check, CLI requests can be run from a clone as operation-specific JSON read from standard input or an explicit --input file:

node dist/adapters/cli.js resolve --input request.json --pretty

If you install a locally packed copy, the same entry point is available as dependency-engine.

The MCP server exposes graph_validate, dependency_resolve, dependency_impact, dependency_slice, and dependency_explain. The local HTTP adapter exposes matching POST /v1/* routes and GET /health. When the npm package is installed from a local pack rather than cloned, run the MCP entry point as node node_modules/@openadam/dependency-engine/dist/adapters/mcp.js.

Start the built local HTTP adapter with:

node dist/adapters/http-server.js --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8787

The HTTP adapter defaults to 127.0.0.1 and is intended for trusted local use. It does not provide authentication, authorization, or TLS. Do not expose it directly to an untrusted network; see the security policy.

License

Copyright 2026 openAdam. Licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Bundled browser dependencies are documented in the third-party notices. The license does not grant rights to the Gridlace or openAdam names; see the brand policy.

See the product identity, product model, and review contract for exact boundaries.