SIDJUA (GoetzKohlberg/sidjua) is an AGPL-3.0 governance-first orchestration platform that runs a five-stage pre-action pipeline (forbidden, approval, budget, classification, policy) outside the agent before any action executes.
Its thesis is that governance enforced by architecture beats governance enforced by prompting, and the pipeline order is the whole argument: if an action is forbidden it never reaches the model, and if it exceeds budget the task is cancelled rather than flagged.
What it is #
Every action passes Forbidden, Approval, Budget, Classification, and Policy checks before the agent’s LLM call happens, and the README states that governance-critical operations have no log-and-review-later mode.
The organization is defined in one divisions.yaml: agents live in divisions and tiers (tier 1 full autonomy, tier 2 approval for sensitive operations, tier 3 fully supervised), each with per-task and per-month budgets, and sidjua apply provisions agents, RBAC, routing, audit tables, and rules in ten steps.
The runtime is a Node.js and SQLite service with a web management console on port 47821, always-on daemons with a four-eyes mutual watchdog, governed cron schedules, an append-only audit trail with SHA-256 integrity checks, bubblewrap sandboxing on Linux, and eight messaging channels.
Providers include Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Groq, Cloudflare Workers AI, Ollama, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and it can import OpenClaw configuration.
It is dual-licensed AGPL-3.0 plus a commercial license, with an enterprise tier for organizations running 100 or more agents.
Status #
Dormant, with the stated restart date missed. The repository was created 2026-03-02 and sits at 26 stars, 2 forks, and 4 open issues as of 2026-09-27, with the last push on 2026-04-21 and the last release v1.1.1 on 2026-04-17. The website announces a development freeze and says public downloads are “scheduled to reopen in July 2026”, but it is now late September 2026 with no source activity for five months and the freeze notice still showing the same date. This is the category’s second stall record after TinyAGI, and the pattern is the same: a compelling governance pitch and a young codebase that ran out of maintainer momentum. The owner is a single GitHub user account, not an organization, and the site’s “we move fast” framing sits awkwardly next to five months of silence.
Strengths #
- The five-stage pre-action pipeline is a clean, explicit model of where each control belongs, and it is the clearest articulation of pre-action enforcement in this category.
- Structural enforcement that the agent cannot detect or disable is the correct answer to prompt-based governance, and the architecture explains it well.
- Self-hosted, air-gap capable, model-agnostic, and light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi with local models.
- The audit trail uses an integrity-verified write-ahead log and a governed scheduler with fail-closed cost caps, which is more than most young tools attempt.
Cautions #
- Downloads are frozen, the reopen date has passed, and the source has been quiet since April 2026; adopt as a fork-first decision or a case study, not as a supported dependency.
- Single maintainer, no organization, and no successor or handoff announced.
- The most striking claims are self-reported: three AI auditor systems, fifteen audits, “most secure Node.js app I’ve audited in years”, and two filed patents. None of this is independently verifiable from the sources I found.
- The site compares itself favorably to Paperclip and OpenClaw in marketing language, so read the comparison table as positioning rather than measurement.
Pricing #
SIDJUA Free is AGPL-3.0 for self-hosting and personal use. A commercial license is required for hosting providers and SaaS operators, and an enterprise license covers 100 or more agents with SLA and compliance support. No dollar prices are published, so there is nothing to track yet.
Compared to #
- Paperclip: the living control plane with budgets, org charts, and a cloud path; choose Paperclip today, and read SIDJUA for the pre-action enforcement model.
- Microsoft Agent Governance Toolkit: governance wired into existing frameworks in five languages; choose AGT when you already have agents, and SIDJUA when you want the orchestrator and the governance in one self-hosted platform.
- Veto: a single authorization gate rather than a platform; choose Veto for a narrow, live tool-call control and SIDJUA as a case study of the broader pipeline.
Bottom line #
Recommended as a case study of pre-action enforcement architecture, and as a fork candidate for a self-hosted governed agent company. Not for production adoption while downloads are frozen, the announced reopen date has passed, and there is no maintainer activity to depend on.
Changes #
- 2026-09-27 - Created.
See also #
- Control Planes Feature Matrix - the category compared on shared rows
- TinyAGI - the category’s first stall record, and the same momentum pattern
- Paperclip - the surviving control plane with the governance SIDJUA pitched against
- Microsoft Agent Governance Toolkit - the live alternative for governance of existing agents
- Scaling the LLM Agent Company - the corpus piece on why these platforms stall
References #
https://github.com/GoetzKohlberg/sidjua - README: five-stage pipeline, divisions and tiers, audit WAL, licensing, roadmap
https://api.github.com/repos/GoetzKohlberg/sidjua - stars, forks, issues, last push 2026-04-21 as of 2026-09-27
https://www.sidjua.com/ - homepage: development freeze notice, reopen-in-July claim, self-reported audits
https://sidjua.com/docs - the same freeze and release-status surface