What behold is

behold is a live control plane over a chant estate. chant compiles TypeScript into spec-native infrastructure output; behold reads what chant declared and what the cloud reports, and shows you the difference.

chant source ──build/lint──▶ graph IR ──behold──▶ live graph + drift + (delegated) actions
              (deterministic)          (server + browser)

The mixed estate is the point

behold shows the estate that spans substrates: an EKS cluster declared in CloudFormation and the Kubernetes Service running on it, beside any Argo CD or Flux project.

Each substrate has its own kind of truth, and behold keeps them distinct rather than flattening:

substrate	what “deployed” means there
AWS	CloudFormation lists the resource, and the last stack operation succeeded
Kubernetes	the object exists, its owned Pods are running, and chant’s field manager still owns the fields it wrote
Azure / GCP	the resource answered a read; there is no deploy object to ask

That last row is why component status reads from a resource rollup rather than a stack: on a substrate with no deployment object, the stack cannot be the source of truth, because there isn’t one.

Read-only core, delegated writes

behold writes nothing to a cloud or to your source itself. Every write it offers is a command it starts for you, run by a tool you already trust.

• Every view is a read: chant graph, snapshots, live describes. Viewing needs only read roles.
• Sync starts the ApplyOp your project committed. Adopt starts your ReconcileOp, which opens a PR a human merges.
• Deploy on a project with no committed ApplyOp runs chant run <component> --components on chant’s local executor, as a child of behold. It applies with the credentials in behold’s environment, so Deploy from behold needs write roles there.
• An environment .behold.json designates to a forge is never applied from your machine; Deploy dispatches the forge’s workflow through your gh.
• A terragucci repo is applied by its pipeline only: behold refuses every deploy, Op run, approval and dispatch there, and offers none of them.
• A SQL Yodeler repo (one with a yodel.config.ts) is guarded the same way. Its refusal says code: "sql-yodeler" and names npx yodel approve <env> --plan <digest> (with --sign under a sealed gate) and yodel apply <env> in the project’s pipeline.

Authority stays in your committed source and your executor. If a request would have behold write to a cloud or to source directly, that is a bug.

Why that matters for an agent

An agent driving behold can look at everything. What it can change is what the commands above can change with the credentials behold was started with, so start it with read-only credentials when nothing should be applied from it.

What it is not

• Not a deployer: behold starts your Ops or chant’s local executor, and they do the work.
• Not a state store. Truth lives in the live system, and ownership is read from a marker on the resource.
• Not a new abstraction over your cloud. The graph is your declarations and your resources, at their real names.