Nidus: Externalized Reasoning for AI-Assisted Engineering

arXiv:2604.05080v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present Nidus, a governance runtime that mechanizes the V-model for AI-assisted software delivery. In the self-hosting deployment, three LLM families (Claude, Gemini, Codex) delivered a 100,000-line system under proof obligations verified against the current obligation set on every commit. The system governed its own construction.
Engineering invariants – traced requirements, justified architecture, evidenced deliveries – cannot be reliably maintained as learned behavior; assurance requires enforcement by a mechanism external to the proposer. Nidus externalizes the engineering methodology into a decidable artifact verified on every mutation before persistence. Organizational standards compile into guidebooks – constraint libraries imported by governed projects and enforced by decidable evaluation.
Four contributions: (1) recursive self-governance – the constraint surface constrains mutations to itself; (2) stigmergic coordination – friction from the surface routes agents without central control; (3) proximal spec reinforcement – the living artifact externalizes the engineering context that RL and long-chain reasoning try to internalize; the specification is the reward function, UNSAT verdicts shape behavior at inference time, no weight updates; (4) governance theater prevention – compliance evidence cannot be fabricated within the modeled mutation path. The constraint surface compounds: each obligation permanently eliminates a class of unengineered output. The artifact’s development history is a formal development – every state satisfies all active obligations, and the obligation set grows monotonically.