Xanthe Incident Agent

An incident-response agent that drives a runbook on rails. The procedure is a plain XState machine mounted as an MCP server by Xanthe, and the agent can only take the moves the machine allows. The division of labor:

• the machine owns the procedure (you cannot mitigate before diagnosing, resolve before recovery is verified, or close before a postmortem is written),
• the agent supplies judgment (the hypothesis, the root cause, the mitigation),
• the ledger is the audit trail (every step and every refused step, hash-chained).

A premature resolve is refused by the server, not trusted to the model's judgment, and the refusal is recorded. By the time the incident is closed, the machine's context is a complete postmortem, assembled as a side effect of being forced through the right order.

Run it

npm install

Offline (deterministic policy, no API key)

npm start

A scripted policy walks the same gated runbook to resolution and verifies the ledger.

With Claude

npm run agent            # or: MODEL=claude-opus-4-8 npm run agent

Uses the Claude Agent SDK, which authenticates with your existing Claude Code login (no API key). The Xanthe server is registered as an MCP server, so Claude only ever acts through the gated step / state tools: it reads state, narrates each move, recovers from refusals, and writes the postmortem. It is held to the runbook the whole way.

What you see

gate check: resolve before mitigating -> refused (legal here: triage)

driving the runbook:
  detected       triage               -> triaged
  triaged        page_oncall          -> engaged
  engaged        form_hypothesis      -> investigating
  ...
  resolved       write_postmortem     -> closed

final state: "closed" (terminal: true)
postmortem assembled by being forced through the runbook: { ...severity, rootCause, ... }
ledger: intact (10 entries, including the refused gate check)

The runbook

machine/incident-runbook.ts is plain XState. Edit it, or point the agent at your own runbook. Xanthe validates it at mount and rejects machines that auto-advance, so it stays a step-gated procedure the agent drives one decision at a time.

License

Apache-2.0.