Charter — AI-Agent Readiness Scanner

charter.yaml is Charter’s repo-root configuration file. It is optional — Charter still runs with built-in defaults when the file is absent. In v1 it exposes two configuration surfaces: policy for score gating and mcp.trustedRemotes for reviewed remote MCP hosts. File location: repo root. Auto-discovered by all Charter commands.

Full example

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://use-charter.dev/schema/charter.schema.json
policy:
  profile: standard    # standard (80), strict (90), or relaxed (60)
  threshold: 85        # optional: overrides the profile's default threshold

mcp:
  trustedRemotes:
    - "api.your-internal-tool.com"
    - "mcp.your-company.com"

The first line is optional but recommended: it points editors (via the YAML Language Server used by VS Code, Neovim, and others) at Charter’s published schema for inline validation and autocomplete. charter init adds it for you.

Fields

string

Named threshold preset. Accepted values:

Value	Threshold	When to use
`relaxed`	60	Repos still ramping up agent-readiness
`standard`	80	Default for most repos
`strict`	90	Security-sensitive or production repos

Default: standard

integer

Explicit numeric threshold. Accepted range: 0–100.Overrides the default threshold for the selected policy.profile. Use this when you want an exact gate that doesn’t map cleanly to the named profiles (for example, 85).

string[]

List of remote MCP server hostnames to add to the trusted allowlist for AE-MCP-002.Entries are hostnames, not full URLs. This repo-level list is combined with Charter’s built-in catalog of known vendor-operated hosts. Local origins (localhost, 127.0.0.1) are always exempt and do not need to be listed.

Threshold precedence

When multiple threshold sources are present, Charter applies them in this order:

--threshold flag  >  policy.threshold  >  policy.profile default  >  built-in default (80)

If you set both profile and threshold, the threshold value wins. The profile label becomes documentation only.

Example: a CLI invocation always wins over the repo config:

charter doctor --threshold 95

This gates at 95 regardless of what charter.yaml says, without modifying the file.

Validation

Charter fails fast on invalid configuration:

Unknown policy.profile values → error at startup
policy.threshold outside 0..100 → error at startup
Malformed YAML → error at startup

Schema

The full JSON Schema is published at https://use-charter.dev/schema/charter.schema.json. Reference it with the # yaml-language-server: $schema=… header shown above for editor validation and autocomplete. Source: web/public/schema/charter.schema.json.

Next steps

Policy Profiles

The named threshold presets and how precedence resolves.

GitHub Action

How the action reads charter.yaml policy in CI.

Investigate MCP Findings

Resolve the rules that mcp.trustedRemotes governs.

MCP Safety Model

Why the allowlist exists and what it protects against.

​Full example

​Fields

​Threshold precedence

​Validation

​Schema

​Next steps

Policy Profiles

GitHub Action

Investigate MCP Findings

MCP Safety Model

Full example

Fields

Threshold precedence

Validation

Schema

Next steps