trust-velocity-calculator

# Trust Doesn't Just Decay. It Decays Faster When Things Change.

> Helps identify when a trusted skill or agent is losing reliability faster than time alone would suggest — by measuring both elapsed time and the rate of change in behavior, permissions, and dependencies.

## Problem

A verification badge from 18 months ago represents less trust than a badge from 3 months ago. That much is intuitive. What's less intuitive is that a badge from 6 months ago on a skill that has received 8 updates in the last 4 weeks represents less trust than a badge from 12 months ago on a skill that hasn't changed at all.

Trust decay is not linear with time. It accelerates with change velocity. A skill that updates frequently is either actively maintained (good) or actively modified toward new objectives (potentially bad). The update rate is a multiplier on decay — high velocity amplifies uncertainty. A skill with a high change rate and an old audit badge is more uncertain than a skill with a low change rate and the same old badge, because more surface area has changed without re-verification.

Current trust models treat verification as binary and time-independent: verified or not, with a vague sense that older is riskier. Trust velocity makes the decay quantitative: trust score = baseline × time_factor × (1 - change_velocity_penalty).

## What This Calculates

This calculator produces trust velocity assessments across five dimensions:

1. **Time decay factor** — How much has raw elapsed time since last verification reduced the baseline trust score? Configurable decay curves: linear, exponential, or step-function by verification type
2. **Change velocity multiplier** — How many meaningful changes (permission expansions, new endpoints, dependency updates, instruction drift) have occurred per unit time since last verification? Higher velocity = faster decay
3. **Volatility window** — Is the current update rate higher or lower than the skill's historical baseline? A su...