Pawl
Registry-as-ground-truth verification & autonomous research framework for agent-driven development.
Coding agents don't remember. Every new session starts blind: what was
already proven, what failed and why, which dead ends were closed for good —
gone, buried in chat scrollback and stale plan documents. So agents re-try
known failures, re-explore settled questions, and report "done" for work
that no gate ever verified. Pawl fixes this by making progress itself a
machine-readable artifact: every meaningful change is a claim with
acceptance gates frozen before implementation, a CSV registry — not
plans, not dashboards, not memory of a conversation — records what is
actually implemented, and failures are written down as honest negatives
that name the missing capability and permanently block the dead end. Like
the mechanism it is named after — the small catch that lets a ratchet
wheel turn forward but never slip back — Pawl makes verified progress the
only direction the record can move. The origin project ran 590 claims
through it in 18 days with 4–5 parallel agent sessions: 404 verified,
167 honest negatives, zero corrupted records (see the
case study).
Works for any kind of software project — web app, library, ML project,
CLI tool. Pure Python standard library, zero dependencies: adopt it by
copying one folder and writing one small config file.
Why "Pawl"?
A pawl is the small catch in a ratchet mechanism — the part that
engages the teeth of a ratchet wheel and lets it turn forward one click at
a time, but blocks any backward slip. That is the whole metaphor: agent
sessions should advance only on verified progress, and known dead ends
should stay closed instead of being re-explored every time someone opens a
fresh chat.
The name is also a nod to
karpathy/autoresearch (March
2026), which uses the same ratchet idea for a single training file: keep
improvements, discard regressions, one scalar, one budget. Pawl generalizes
that loop to a whole repository — many concurrent claims, per-claim edit
scopes, a persistent dependency-linked registry, and honest negatives
promoted into the record instead of silently reset away.
Shopware & Agentic Commerce Lab
Pawl is maintained and open-sourced by
[Agentic Commerce Lab](https://github.com/agentic-c