Governance and architectural commitments

What limlock is, and isn't

Limlock is a coordination protocol for multi-principal group event planning, with golf as its reference vertical. It receives intent descriptions from peer agents representing distinct human principals, intersects their constraints, and returns ranked booking options for the group to negotiate. The schema is named for the horizontal (GroupEventIntent) and specialized for the vertical (GolfIntent extends GroupEventIntent).

It is not an inventory marketplace, not a transaction processor, and not a competitor to the booking systems that course operators already run. The product surface is deliberately upstream of booking — Limlock helps a group agree, then hands the agreed round to the course's own system to reserve.

Architectural non-aggregation

These are stated as architectural principles, not marketing language:

• Limlock does not aggregate inventory. Course tee times live in the course's system. Limlock queries them live or caches ephemerally for coordination and lets the cache expire — there is no competing index.
• Limlock does not hold payment. Transactions settle on the course's payment systems or via the end-user's delegated payment agent. Limlock is never in the flow of funds.
• Limlock does not transact without end-user consent. Every booking proposal resolves via a participant's vote or a delegated agent's pre-authorized consent. There is no autonomous commitment.
• Limlock routes committed demand through courses' own systems. The coordination output is handed off to the course; the course owns the booking relationship with the golfer.

Payments posture

Limlock supports agent-initiated payment delegation via the emerging A2A-extension standards for payment authorization, settlement, and commerce — specifically the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and its successor protocols.

The coordination protocol is designed to compose with these payment protocols rather than replace them. Limlock produces a booking proposal as its terminal artifact; downstream payment protocols close the loop. Reference implementations of specific standards will ship as those standards reach production maturity in partner-accepting venues.

Stakeholder consequences

For courses

Committed demand routes to your existing booking system. There is no Limlock-side inventory copy, no shadow marketplace, no GolfNow-style intermediation.

For golfers

Your data and consent stay in your control. Limlock retains coordination state and the signed receipt chain as the verifiable history of the round; nothing settles or moves money on your behalf without your explicit confirmation. Retention specifics at /privacy.

For regulators

Limlock is a protocol, not a marketplace. No flow of funds, no inventory aggregation, no autonomous transaction authority. Architectural commitments above are auditable against the published spec.

For agent partners

A2A-native discovery via /.well-known/agent-card.json, a published versioned schema, and a cryptographic coordination-receipt log designed for third-party verification.