- Who it helps
- Developers designing review and validation for coding agents.
- Availability
- Russ Little published version 1.0 as a request for comments on October 29. The paper and machine-readable patterns are public under CC BY 4.0.
Protect the requirement
The proposal keeps a locked statement of user intent separate from an agent’s implementation. Assertions of success need evidence that the author does not control.
Prove a check can catch a defect
Validation checks should be tested against the failures they are meant to detect. For example, a planted defect can reveal whether a test would reject the faulty behavior. This is a design principle, not proof that the supplied patterns eliminate bugs.
What you can do
- Read the primary description and its stated limits before planning an evaluation. Open reference ↗
Where the evidence stops
No delivery pipeline was built or evaluated. This is a proposal with thirty-three patterns, not a measured guarantee of reliability.
Sources read. Public source text read November 10, 2026 UTC. No third-party project, model inference or complete workflow executed.
Sources & further reading
Web · official
ZTHR pattern language ↗
October 29 request for comments describes independent evidence and tests checked against known defects.
Russ Little · page checked 2026-11-10 · Published 2026-10-29
GitHub · implementation
ZTHR paper and pattern data ↗
Repository supplies the paper and thirty-three patterns as data.
Russ Little · page checked 2026-11-10
More sources reviewed (1)
Hacker News · discussion
New Show HN submissions ↗
First fourteen titles inspected; ZTHR and BlablaMeter followed to primary descriptions.
Hacker News · page checked 2026-11-10
Coverage note: Independent execution and qualifying dated cross-platform attention remain incomplete.
The record over time (1)
Dated source checks and published explanations. An observation date can differ from the original release date.
- · Added to Current
ZTHR (Zero Trust High Reliability) proposes software-delivery patterns built around protected requirements and independently checked evidence.