Three lanes, one
system that travels.
This document governs the System of components that hold a working context across sessions and machines, so that what an agent knows of its principal does not leak when the model, the agent, or the employer changes.
AI working context is a new category of professional capital, and it leaks at every change of model, agent, or employer. The fix lives on the user side, and it is not a single tool.
It is a small System of components, each with a distinct role, a distinct repo, and a distinct change cadence. These Articles map that System and the discipline that holds it together.
The System shall be composed of three components.
The System shall consist of three components, each with a role-name, a repo, and a change cadence of its own.
The Charter shall hold the methodology canon: the principles held across projects, the cross-cutting invariants of daily discipline, and the role-specific patterns of the work. It shall be hand-authored prose, slow to change, amended deliberately and by review.
The Executive shall be the contents of the configuration slot made into a tracked, installable, version-controlled artefact: settings, agent definitions, rules, skills, and hooks. The Archive shall be the persistent user state and the concept capture: handoffs, projects, daily-notes, the inbox, templates, drafts, and the framing notes that have not yet hardened into discipline.
No component shall take on the lifecycle of another. The Charter is slow; the Archive is continuous; the Executive moves at the pace of the session.
The Archive shall be read in place.
Access to the Archive shall be filesystem-direct, through the agent's own reading tools, with no intermediating server between the Hand and the files.
The agent shall read the markdown of the Archive in place, by its built-in Read, Glob, and Grep. The former server having been retired, no process shall stand between the agent and the stored word.
The pointers to canonical source, which folders an agent shall consult before drafting, where memory lives, and what counts as a bootstrap surface, shall be documented in their own record and honoured.
Concepts shall be lifted into canon by deliberate edit.
A concept held in the Archive shall be provisional canon, and shall become hardened canon only by a deliberate lift into Charter prose.
An idea shall live in the Archive while it matures: useful to the agent that reads it in context, but not yet committed to as a rule. When it has been cited enough, applied consistently enough, and pressure-tested enough, it shall be lifted out of Archive prose and codified as Charter prose.
A concept shall lift when its claims are general, have been applied across many situations, and would serve agents in contexts yet to come. It shall remain in the Archive when it is a framing held loosely, a one-off observation, or content bound to a single moment or decision.
No lift shall run in reverse and no lift shall run on its own. The canon shall not pull from the Archive automatically; the lift shall be a deliberate edit, one way.
The System shall be provisioned in fixed order.
On a fresh machine the System shall be installed in a fixed sequence, the Executive first, for the Executive is the entry point.
The manual prerequisites shall be laid first, the bootstrap of the bootstrap, and the Executive checkout shall be cloned to its known path. The install script, which lives in the Executive, shall then clone the sibling repos and symlink the configuration subdirectories from the Executive checkout. A finisher run from inside the agent shall reconcile server registration and verify that the clones are present.
The symlink install shall run against the Executive checkout, and so the Executive clone shall precede the symlink step. The Charter and the Archive shall bear no install dependency upon each other and may clone in parallel; the Charter prose is referenced in place and installed nowhere.
The lifecycles shall not be mixed.
The three components shall remain separate, for a single repo would mix lifecycles that have nothing in common.
Slow-moving methodology shall not share commits with daily handoffs, and operational discipline shall not share branches with concept capture. Each natural rhythm of change shall keep its own lane.
The separation shall serve reviewability, for each PR is a different mental mode and a different standard. It shall serve bootstrappability, keeping the dependency graph thin. It shall honour the privacy gradient, for the Charter is the nearest to one day being public and the Archive the furthest, and the two shall not be locked together. And it shall preserve independent forkability, that another agent might one day consume the Charter prose without the rest.
This shape shall not be load-bearing for one user on one machine. It shall be load-bearing for the portability thesis: that this surface should travel across agents, machines, and contexts.
Runtime and scaffolding shall not be counted as components.
A thing shall be a component only where it is user-facing professional capital; runtime-internal state and environment scaffolding shall not be counted.
The agent memory shall not be a component, for it is agent-internal operational memory, closer to RAM than to disk, ephemeral on a fresh install and rebuilt over time. The agent itself shall not be a component, for the agent runs the three and the three run upon it; the swap of one agent for another is the portability story. The home-level state and the working surface shall not be components, the one being machine-local user state and the other the documented surface the System occupies.
The distinction that governs: components are the rules held, the contexts captured, and the tools built. The rest is either runtime-internal or the scaffolding of the environment, and shall be named as such.
This document shall yield to the repos.
This architecture description shall be a synthesis of the canonical artefacts, and not itself a source of truth.
The repos themselves, their READMEs, their tags, their releases, and their commit histories are the canonical record. This document is a derived view of them.
Where this document says one thing and the repos say another, the repos shall be trusted and this document shall be regenerated.
These Articles may be amended in the open, as a charter shows its revisions.
The cursor waits for the next hand.