Automation & AI Agents

Certum Draft has a local automation API that lets AI assistants and scripts do real work through the app — reading matters, scanning and rendering documents, drafting invoice lines, filing notes — with the app’s own rules (locks, numbering, drafts, the audit log) enforced on every call. It is the foundation of a comprehensive agentic API that is growing release by release, and it is built on one principle: the machine drafts, the solicitor decides.

Everything runs on your Mac. There is no cloud service, no account, and nothing listening on the network — the API is a Unix socket that only processes running as you, on your Mac, can reach.

Turning it on

Settings → Automation has two switches, deliberately separate:

Enable local automation API — persists across launches and starts the socket. While it’s on, a bolt icon shows in the menu bar and any tool running as your user on this Mac can read matter data.
Allow automation writes — session-scoped: it resets every time Certum Draft quits, so write access is a fresh decision each session, never ambient. Every write is recorded in the audit log.

Every request — reads included — is appended to an audit log (automation-audit.jsonl, revealable from the Settings pane), with the calling tool’s name and, for writes, the full payload.

What agents can do today

Read — search matters; get a matter’s details, fields, documents, correspondence and calendar; list upcoming key dates across the practice; read the invoice register and firm accounts; look up the estates institution catalogue; read a matter’s tasks (matter.tasks) and its checklist with each item’s tick state and provenance (matter.checklist).

Work with documents — scan a template for its placeholders, and render documents through the same engine the document wizard uses, into the matter’s own folders.

Draft, for your approval — the writes are shaped so a human decision sits between the agent and the record:

Field proposals never touch the matter directly. matter.propose_fields files a pending proposal batch; the values sit in the workspace for the solicitor to review and apply — or withdraw — one by one.
Invoice lines append to the matter’s invoice draft (idempotent, so an agent retry can’t double-bill), and the solicitor reviews the draft before any bill is generated.
File notes are filed as PDFs into Correspondence via the same engine as the File Note button — see File Notes.
Estate institutions can be added and their lifecycle updated, and grants recorded — the same audited operations the institutions workspace uses.
Checklist items can be ticked, unticked, or marked not-applicable (matter.checklist.update) with exactly the workspace’s semantics — the audit log records who, and the item’s provenance shows the API client’s name.
Tasks can be completed (matter.task.done — idempotent, verified against the matter). Task creation over the API is deliberately deferred; agents create tasks through the Notion side directly.

Deliberately absent: there is no matter.create. Opening a file is a professional decision with intake, conflict and identity obligations attached — matter creation stays with the humans, and the API’s jurisdiction begins after the wizard.

Connecting an AI assistant

The API speaks MCP (the Model Context Protocol), so Claude Code — or any MCP host — connects with one command:

claude mcp add certum -- /path/to/clarity-reborn/scripts/certum-mcp

The bridge discovers the op list from the app at connect time, so as the API grows, new tools appear automatically. Read tools are marked read-only to the host; write tools are labelled [WRITE].

Scripts can skip MCP and speak to the socket directly — newline-delimited JSON, one request per line. The socket path and protocol are documented in the repository’s docs/AUTOMATION_API.md.

Where this is heading

The surface today covers reading, document work, invoice drafting, notes and the estates register. The goal is a comprehensive agentic API over the whole matter lifecycle — an assistant that can prepare the next step on any matter and hand it to you for the decision — with every extension keeping the same three properties: local, audited, and human-approved.

File Notes — the note engine the API shares
Invoices — where API-drafted lines land for review
Institutions — the estates lifecycle the API can drive
Settings — the Automation pane