One rule shapes it: cheap checks first, Claude only when it is needed, and no equipment moves without a recorded approval.
11 steps, from a reading arriving to a record a regulator can trust. Pick one to light its parts on the map.
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Simulator
A hydraulic model of a fictional town's pipes and plant stands in for real equipment. The simulator sends pressure, flow, tank-level and water-quality readings from its simulated sensors, the way a real control system would, and plays scripted incidents such as a main break.
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Event bus
Every service passes its events over Redis Streams: shared logs where new events join the end and are never rewritten. No service needs to know another, any moment can be replayed, and every event can be traced.
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Rule checks, voters and consensus
Rule checks hold each reading to limits from regulations and research, and three statistical voters catch slow trends, drift and sensors that disagree. Consensus opens the incident: a breached limit, a treatment-change review or a confirmed resident report opens one on its own, but a warning needs two different kinds of watcher to agree.
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Sentinel
Alongside the water, the Sentinel watches the plant's computers: three always-on watchers check every sign-in, every flow between the office and control networks, and every command sent to a controller. A correlator joins their signals into one alert, asking Claude only when they form a pattern; it cannot cut anything off itself, so each containment step waits for a person's approval.
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Response ladder and Claude
The response ladder climbs only as far as the evidence needs: rules, a hydraulic impact check, a Haiku triage, then if needed one assessment from Sonnet, or Opus when a public notice may be due within 24 hours, never both. An answer that does not match the required format is retried once, then the incident carries on rules-only.
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Response playbook and approvals
The response playbook, plain code rather than the model, turns the evidence into proposed actions. Each one waits for a recorded yes or no from someone allowed to make that call, or from a scripted stand-in for a role nobody has taken: nothing moves a valve or posts a notice without it.
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Equipment (simulated) and recovery
The actuator is the only way a decision reaches the simulated plant, and it refuses any action with no approval behind it. The recovery director then walks the incident back to normal, and every follow-up notice waits for approval too.
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On-call escalation and the Staffing agent
On-call escalation pages the fewest people needed, going up a tier only when nobody answers or the job needs more authority. The Staffing agent, a bounded Claude loop over the read-only Directory MCP server, picks who gets each page and skips anyone on leave; it can only propose a recall from leave, which the plant manager must approve.
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Comms bridge
The comms bridge turns approved notices into posts on X, from fixed wording marked [SIMULATION], and pushes pages to staff phones. A post goes out live only when the server's switch is on and the run was started with the lead key. Anything a guest starts or approves stays a dry run, and so does a staff seat's approval or wording unless the lead turns that room live.
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Hash-chained log, archive and reports
Every event except raw readings and heartbeats joins a hash-chained log, where each entry carries a fingerprint of the one before, so an edited entry breaks the chain. The archive keeps a permanent case file per incident from that log; reports take their figures from code, and Claude writes only the narrative.
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Investigator
After the fact, staff ask the Investigator what happened: a bounded Claude loop over the read-only Auditor MCP server, built for a regulator's agent too. Its tools read the log and the frozen archive and cannot write, and every claim must cite a tool result.
One rule shapes it: cheap checks first, Claude only when it is needed, and no equipment moves without a recorded approval.
11 steps, from a reading arriving to a record a regulator can trust. Pick one to light its parts on the map.