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Bilko Sentinel — Tier-0 Self-Healing Agent 2026-06-10

Status

LIVE and Proveo-verified as of 2026-06-10. MC #103337 (AgentForge implementation) + MC #103337 Proveo independent verification. Parent MC #103328. Dynamic policy discovery added MC #103420 (2026-06-11).

Related: Bilko Observability (GCP-native) 2026-06-10 — Tier-1 (bounded auto-remediation, SHADOW): Bilko Sentinel Tier-1 (Shadow-First) 2026-06-11 — the GCP alert layer this agent reads from.

What It Is

Bilko Sentinel is a read-only ops agent that runs on ANVIL every 3 minutes. It follows a four-stage pipeline:

  1. Detect — at cycle start, dynamically discovers all enabled GCP Monitoring alert policies via gcloud alpha monitoring policies list (SA alai-cli-deployer, quota project). Normalizes each conditionThreshold into the evaluator’s internal shape, then evaluates the last 6 minutes of time-series data against every condition. The policy set is cached for 5 minutes (bilko-sentinel-policy-cache.json) to avoid hammering the API every 180-second cycle. If the fetch fails, falls back to the embedded list and logs a WARN — never crashes, never goes silently blind. Currently evaluates 9 policies (13 conditions).
  2. Enrich — on a breach, fetches recent Cloud Run logs and the current revision/traffic split for the affected service.
  3. Diagnose — calls FORGE Ollama (qwen2.5:7b-instruct-q8_0 at 10.0.0.2:11434) with a structured JSON prompt (temperature 0.1) to produce a root-cause hypothesis and recommended action. Falls back to a deterministic template per cause category if Ollama is unreachable.
  4. Propose — posts exactly one structured proposal per unique incident to Slack #ceo and email [email protected]. Deduplicates by incident key; does not re-notify the same breach for 24 hours.

It never changes anything. Proveo independently verified: zero mutating verbs, no GCP mutations of any kind (no run deploy, no set-iam-policy, no SQL writes, no secrets writes). The only HTTP POST in the script goes to the Ollama local inference endpoint, not to googleapis.com. The gcloud alpha monitoring policies list call added in MC #103420 is a read-only list operation — forbidden-verb scan still returns 0 matches (verified by AgentForge evidence proof_5).

Infrastructure

ComponentLocation
Script/Users/makinja/system/tools/bilko-sentinel.js
LaunchAgent plist/Users/makinja/Library/LaunchAgents/com.alai.bilko-sentinel.plist
State file (dedup)/Users/makinja/system/state/bilko-sentinel-state.json
Policy discovery cache/Users/makinja/system/state/bilko-sentinel-policy-cache.json — 5-min TTL
Audit log/Users/makinja/system/logs/bilko-sentinel-audit.jsonl
Run log/Users/makinja/system/logs/bilko-sentinel.log
HostANVIL (makinja local Mac)
Schedule180-second interval, RunAtLoad=true
Node.js path/opt/homebrew/bin/node

Policies Monitored — Dynamic Discovery (9 policies, 13 conditions)

As of MC #103420 (2026-06-11), the Sentinel dynamically discovers all enabled GCP alert policies each cycle. The list below reflects the 9 policies currently active. Any policy added to GCP Console or via FlowForge is automatically picked up without a code change.

  1. Cloud SQL CPU utilization high (prod + stage)
  2. Container restart/crash on prod services
  3. HTTP 5xx rate high on bilko-api-demo
  4. HTTP 5xx rate high on bilko-web-demo
  5. Request latency P95 high on prod services (API + Web — 2 conditions)
  6. CIAM — High 429 rate on bilko-api-demo
  7. Cloud SQL connections near max on bilko-demo-db
  8. Uptime check failed (app.bilko.cloud + app-api.bilko.cloud — 2 conditions)
  9. Bilko API Demo — Backend ERROR log rate (bilko_api_demo_error_count, policy #2342970117877340710, added MC #103364) — this policy was missed by the old hardcoded list and is what prompted MC #103420

Condition type support: conditionThreshold (metric threshold) — fully evaluated; covers all 9 current policies. conditionAbsent and other types — logged and skipped, cannot fire false positives.

Severity Scale

LabelMeaning
P1-DOWNService is down or uptime check failing
P2-DEGRADEDElevated error rate or restart loop
P3-WARNLatency spike, DB pressure, CIAM abuse rate

Notification Format

Every proposal contains:

  • Header: BILKO SENTINEL — PROPOSAL (Tier-0, no action taken)
  • Incident ID, severity, env, resource, condition name
  • Metric value vs threshold (exact numbers)
  • Root-cause hypothesis (Ollama-generated or deterministic fallback)
  • Proposed remediation steps (for human to execute)
  • GCP Console link for the alert incident
  • Detected timestamp

Dedup key format: bilko-{policyId[-8:]}-{condId[-8:]}. Once notified, silent for 24 hours on the same condition.

Proveo Verification Summary

Proveo (MC #103337) independently verified all critical properties:

PropertyMethodResult
Read-only guaranteeExhaustive grep of all spawnSync calls and HTTP methodsCONFIRMED — zero mutating verbs
LaunchAgent loaded + healthylaunchctl list | grep bilko-sentinel — LastExitStatus=0PASS
Detect → Propose → Slack deliveryIndependent verifier script with synthetic threshold (2ms vs real 9.5ms P95)PASS — Slack message confirmed in #ceo at 04:24 UTC
Detect → Propose → Email deliverySame synthetic testPASS — Message-ID confirmed in audit DB
Dedup across cyclesReal 2-cycle disk-persistence test (not code inspection only)PASS — Cycle 2 silent, no second Slack message
Healthy = silentNormal threshold against real metric valuePASS — zero messages sent
No GCP mutationCloud Run revision before/after comparisonPASS — bilko-api-demo-00167-h9v unchanged
Read-only guarantee (MC #103420)Forbidden-verb grep: gcloud run deploy, set-iam, secrets write, policy create/update/delete — 0 matchesCONFIRMED — gcloud alpha monitoring policies list is a read-only list call

Honest gaps noted by AgentForge (now closed by Proveo): email exit-code quirk (fixed in script via stdout check); dedup 2-cycle test (now independently proven); Ollama not re-exercised in Proveo test (builder’s synthtest confirmed it live).

Incident-Driven Hardening (MC #103420)

On 2026-06-10, a 503 burst on bilko-api-demo fired alert policy bilko_api_demo_error_count (policy ID 2342970117877340710, added in MC #103364). The Sentinel did not fire a proposal because that policy was not in the original hardcoded list — it had been added after the Sentinel was built.

MC #103420 replaced the static list with dynamic discovery (discoverPolicies()): each cycle the Sentinel fetches all enabled policies from GCP, so any future policy added in GCP Console or by FlowForge is automatically evaluated with zero code changes. The hardcoded ALERT_POLICIES array is kept as a fallback only. AgentForge re-verified the read-only guarantee post-fix (forbidden-verb scan: 0 matches). The Tier-0 read-only contract is unchanged.

Runbook

Pause sentinel

launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.alai.bilko-sentinel.plist

Resume sentinel

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.alai.bilko-sentinel.plist

Check last run status

launchctl list | grep bilko-sentinel
# PID="-" = not currently running (between intervals). LastExitStatus=0 = healthy.

tail -20 /Users/makinja/system/logs/bilko-sentinel.log

View audit trail

tail -f /Users/makinja/system/logs/bilko-sentinel-audit.jsonl

View current policy discovery cache

cat /Users/makinja/system/state/bilko-sentinel-policy-cache.json

Add a new alert policy

Create or enable the alert policy in GCP Console (or via FlowForge). The Sentinel will automatically discover and evaluate it at the next cache refresh (within 5 minutes). No code change needed. To force an immediate pick-up, delete the cache file and wait for the next cycle:

rm -f /Users/makinja/system/state/bilko-sentinel-policy-cache.json

Tune alert thresholds

Thresholds live in the GCP alert policy definitions, not in the Sentinel script. Update the threshold in GCP Console; the Sentinel picks up the new value at the next cache refresh. To update the fallback embedded list (used only when GCP fetch fails), edit ALERT_POLICIES in /Users/makinja/system/tools/bilko-sentinel.js and reload:

launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.alai.bilko-sentinel.plist
# edit the fallback array in the script
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.alai.bilko-sentinel.plist

Tier Model and Safety Rationale

The tier model was defined after the 2026-06 IAM incident, in which an automated set-iam-policy call wiped project IAM. The lesson: any agent that can mutate production infra must earn trust via a demonstrated read-only track record first.

TierCapabilityStatusSafety gates
Tier 0 — current Detect + Diagnose + Propose. Read-only. Posts structured proposal to #ceo and [email protected]. Zero blast radius. LIVE No code path to write to GCP. Proveo-verified. Dynamic discovery is a read-only list call.
Tier 1 — future MC Bounded auto-remediation: Cloud Run revision rollback, instance scale adjustment, hung service restart. Circuit breaker (max N actions/hour). Full audit trail. Never touches DB schema, IAM, secrets, or financial data. Always announces before acting. BUILT — SHADOW (MC #103435). Calibration clock started. See Tier-1 reference page. Explicit CEO approval token (/tmp/bilko-sentinel-tier1-approved) required before any mutation. Separate script (bilko-sentinel-tier1.js). Only after Tier-0 proves signal quality over weeks.
Tier 2 Broader autonomy. Probably never for a prod-financial SaaS N/A

The IAM incident reference is intentional: Tier-1 will be built with a hard whitelist of reversible Cloud Run and scaling operations only. No set-iam-policy, no SQL DDL, no secret rotation — ever.

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