ObsidianWall Verdict

Version updated for https://github.com/ObsidianWall/obsidianwall-verdict to version v0.5.2.

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Action Type

This is a Composite action.

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What’s Changed

ObsidianWall Verdict v0.5.2

Verdict becomes a governance decision engine — not just a policy checker.

What’s New

verdict explain — Full Reasoning on Demand

Terminal output from verdict evaluate is now a concise ~15-line summary by default. Full governance reasoning, condition traces, analyzer findings, and recommendations are one command away:

verdict evaluate --plan plan.json --policy budget.yaml
# → concise decision summary + remediation

verdict explain <decision_id>
# → full reasoning chain, retrieved from local evidence store

verdict explain reads from a dedicated evidence store, not from the --output file — so it works even if that file has since been overwritten by a later run.

Output Formats — --format text|json|yaml

verdict evaluate --plan plan.json --policy budget.yaml
verdict evaluate --plan plan.json --policy budget.yaml --format json
verdict evaluate --plan plan.json --policy budget.yaml --format yaml

text (default) is the new concise summary. json preserves the full artifact for CI/CD pipelines and scripts — unchanged from prior versions. yaml is new. The --output file always contains the complete artifact regardless of which format is chosen for stdout.

Governance Objective

Policies can now declare the organizational outcome they exist to achieve:

metadata:
  governance_objective:
    statement: "Maintain cloud spend within approved budget"

Every decision against that policy reports whether the objective was Upheld, Violated, or Pending Approval — shifting the artifact from reporting technical facts (“budget exceeded”) to reporting whether organizational intent held. Fully optional — existing policies work unchanged.

Evidence Store

Full governance artifacts are now stored separately from the lean decision ledger, in a dedicated decision_artifacts table. This is the foundation verdict explain runs on, and the same store future Sentinel and Compass evidence types (drift snapshots, SBOMs, cost reports) will use without any schema changes.

Rule-Based Recommendation Confidence

Recommendation confidence scores are no longer flat constants — they’re computed per finding type, reflecting how directly a recommendation addresses the specific finding that triggered it.

Upgrading

pip install --upgrade obsidianwall-verdict

No breaking changes. Existing policies, scripts, and CI/CD pipelines using --format json (or the equivalent prior default) continue to work unchanged. verdict evaluate without --format now returns the concise summary instead of the full JSON artifact — add --format json to any script or pipeline that was parsing the old default stdout output.