What is Mentu?

Mentu is a constitutional runtime for agentic intelligence.

Knowledge has a time dimension — evidence decays, context shifts, patterns emerge and dissolve. Mentu provides the substrate for managing this. It tracks what your systems know, when they learned it, how confident they are, and when that confidence should erode.

Core Primitives

Mentu is built on five primitives that compose together:

CIR (Cognitive Infrastructure Retrieval)

The substrate. CIR tracks signals, relations, embeddings, patterns, and contradictions. Every piece of knowledge flows through CIR — captured with a type, domain, confidence score, and timestamp. When two signals conflict, CIR surfaces the contradiction automatically.

Vault

Secure credential storage backed by macOS Keychain. Scoped secrets with owner-only access. Scripts read API keys, tokens, and configuration from the vault without hardcoding sensitive values.

Temporals

Cron-based scheduling with built-in resilience. Each temporal definition includes a circuit breaker (trips after consecutive failures), cooldown periods, and TTL expiry. Temporals fire sequences or scripts on schedule and self-heal when conditions recover.

Sequences

Multi-step recipe orchestration. A sequence chains steps together — each step is a prompt executed by an LLM with access to mentu primitives. Sequences support variables, model selection, and resume-from-step for recovery.

Scripts

TypeScript programs that compose all other primitives. Recipes are declarative, but intelligence needs imperative logic. Scripts bridge the gap — query CIR, read vault secrets, trigger sequences, manage temporals, and call external MCP servers, all in TypeScript running inside a V8 sandbox.

System Components

How It Fits Together

mentu script run audit.ts
    │
    ├─→ V8 Sandbox (mentu-mcp)
    │     ├─→ mentu.cir.query()      → mentu CLI → CIR database
    │     ├─→ mentu.vault.get()      → mentu CLI → macOS Keychain
    │     ├─→ mentu.temporal.list()   → mentu CLI → temporal store
    │     └─→ servers.crawlio.call()  → MCP child → external service
    │
    └─→ stdout (console output + return value as JSON)

Scripts run in an isolated V8 sandbox with no filesystem or network access. The only way to reach external systems is through the mentu SDK object (which shells out to the CLI) or the servers proxy (which routes through MCP).