Descant — Living Decisions

Decisions that know what they depend on.

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Your decision expired. Your meeting notes didn't. A team makes a good call, in good faith. The premises that call rests on live inside each person's role. And watching the decision afterward? That's a job no org chart has. Code got version control, review gates, and CI. Decisions are still prose.

Descant turns a decision into a living object. In our staged demo, five roles decide whether the Global AI Product Rollout ships on the current schedule, under the current regional approval gate. Legal and sales hold context they legitimately can't share in full—so a private agent drafts one exact excerpt, and its owner decides what leaves the workspace. They commit: three premises, a recorded dissent, a reopen condition. Then a synthetic regional regulation changes the approval gate. The event is staged. The mechanics are not. The runtime flags the threatened premise; the decision goes AT_RISK. A person confirms—with a written reason—and it moves to REVIEW_REQUIRED. The dependent action holds, the dissent survives revision, and the whole history exports as JSON.

Underneath are four familiar problems. Contribution shouldn't depend on airtime or rank—each role contributes through its own private agent. Some context legitimately can't be shared—approved excerpts let it count anyway. Commitments drift from execution—dependent actions bind to the decision's state. No role owns noticing a broken premise—noticing becomes a state change, not an argument. The demo proves the second and fourth on screen; the structure addresses all four.

GPT-5.6 works at three call sites—drafting private excerpts, writing the shared decision, judging whether an event breaks a premise—and every output needs a human sign-off. Machine-readable where it can be. Human-confirmed where it must be. Codex built the greenfield, event-sourced core during Build Week: over 800 tests.

AI didn't just speed up your work. It shortened the half-life of your decisions. Descant is a decision runtime for agent-native teams. When everyone has an agent, decisions need a runtime.

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