zetesis

ζήτησις - systematic inquiry.

Planned sovereign research substrate for unifying research and search providers behind one Rust interface with budget enforcement, rate-limit management, cited result normalization, and a cache layer.

Status: Phase 1 scaffold. The locked four-crate workspace has landed; sylloge owns the initial provider/result/budget surface, and zetesis re-exports the public facade. Canonical state: See the internal planning record maintained for active roadmap and blocker status.

Why

Frontier-model built-in search is an opaque black-box priced per-token. Vendor aggregators (Brave / Exa / Tavily / You.com / Valyu / Perplexity) are pay-per-query with little architectural control and costs that compound fast at agent scale.

Zetesis takes a different shape:

• Free-first routing across free-quality academic and reference APIs (Semantic Scholar, arXiv, OpenAlex, Crossref, PubMed, Wikipedia). Most research queries resolve here.
• Self-hosted orchestration for deep research through a local-first research loop running against local LLMs on dedicated GPU time. Multi-step synthesis should not require paid model APIs by default.
• Budget-capped paid APIs (Brave, Exa) as fallback only when Tier 0 misses.
• Cached by default with per-provider freshness windows.
• Cited + structured output always; no synthesis without source provenance.

Architecture

Phase 1 scaffold. The four-crate decomposition below is the locked public design; active planning and decision records are maintained internally.

Crate	Role
zetesis	Facade, CLI, daemon binary, adapter traits
syllogē	Provider abstraction, routing, budget, cache, deep-research-orchestrator wrapper
elenkhos	Retrospective steel-manning engine
synopsis	Briefing synthesizer

Consumer map

• aletheia - nous agents call zetesis as their primary research tool
• dioptron - sovereign web runtime; D5 tiered knowledge store ingests zetesis results
• akroasis - OSINT domain public-source research

Non-goals

• Not a conversational search UI (consumer concern)
• Not a content crawler (route to Firecrawl / trafilatura when needed)
• Not an LLM synthesis engine (consumer's LLM layer)
• Not a vector store (that is heurēma)
• Not a credentials manager (operator vault owns API keys)

Development

Current planning authority lives in the internal project state record. This public README stays stable: purpose, boundaries, consumer map, and the locked crate shape. It should not duplicate the live roadmap.

Design Notes

• Multi-signal classifiers - required evidence record shape for classifier designs that combine weighted signals before export.
• Deep research provider decision - Phase 05 decision to vendor the local-deep-researcher loop pattern, reuse the gpt-researcher vllm_openai adapter shape, and reject open_deep_research as the default contract.

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later

Repository Metadata

• Registry name: zetesis
• Description: Kanon-managed forkwright repository zetesis.
• Forge repo: forkwright/zetesis
• Kanon prefix: ze
• Config source: workflow/kanon.toml [projects.zetesis]
• Planning state: projects/zetesis/STATE.md
• Last state update: 2026-05-25

Run kanon docs sync --check --repo zetesis to verify this generated section and kanon docs sync --apply --repo zetesis to refresh it.

Blast zone

• Paths explicitly named by the rendered prompt, role, or template input.

Acceptance verifier

kanon gate