The Nexus Engine
Deterministic matching, ranked suggestions, and the proactive checklist.
Rules, not guesses
The Nexus Engine is deterministic. Given the same library and the same asset, it always produces the same suggestions in the same order. There is no model making up plausible-sounding attacks — every suggestion traces back to a playbook and the exact components that satisfied it.
That property is what makes the output trustworthy: you can audit it, and you can fix it by fixing your data.
How a match happens
Every time an asset changes, the engine re-evaluates the playbook library against it:
- Hard gates — playbooks are checked against the asset's components. A missing required component excludes the playbook — no exceptions, no partial credit.
- Structure matters — a quirk scoped inside a specific technology is not the same as the same quirk anywhere on the asset. Scoped matches are stronger and rank higher.
- Co-location — where a playbook demands it, requirements must be tied to intersecting endpoints.
- Ranking — satisfied playbooks are scored by how specific and complete the match is. The most precise, best-supported suggestion sits at the top.
- Coverage — the engine also measures how much of what could apply you have actually confirmed.
The proactive checklist
Matching is reactive: it answers questions about what you already recorded. The checklist is proactive: it asks what is still unknown.
For each asset, the engine generates prompts — questions whose answers would unlock more playbooks. Resolving a prompt with evidence updates the asset and triggers a fresh round of matching. A negative answer is a real result, but it must come from checking the full surface: a wrong "no" silently suppresses every playbook behind it.
See Checklist and Probes for the model and Work a Prompt for the practice.
Why it compounds
The engine is not a scanner. It does not know more than you tell it — it knows better than a note pile. Every confirmed component and every consumed prompt sharpens the next suggestion, and earned primitives let later playbooks stand on earlier successes.
What's next
Put it to work: map an asset, then work a prompt.