Where truth
is kept.
This document names the surfaces an agent shall consult to find the canonical material that governs how the work is done.
Where the sibling pattern defines how a fact earns a single canonical source, this charter names the surfaces themselves.
It is an inventory, lifted into prose from a tool that once composed it; the manifest endures though the server does not.
The Rules shall govern every session.
The global agent directives shall be loaded by the System on every session.
The top-level global rules reside at the Hand's own configuration root, attended by domain-specific pointer stubs for github, xcode-build, app-store-connect, and misc, each pointing onward into the Canon. These files are symlinked from the harness repository; an edit lands there immediately.
No edit shall be made beneath the configuration root without per-action consent, as the discipline of identity requires.
Memory shall travel with the Vault.
Behavioural rules and references shall be held in the per-project auto-memory store.
An index is loaded into every conversation within a project, attended by individual feedback, project, reference, and user entries. For the primary working directory, the project slug is fixed, and the memory directory is a symlink.
Every Claude project on the machine shall resolve to the same shared store, for the memory symlink targets the Vault's single flat memory directory; thus memory travels with the Vault and not with the harness.
The Vault shall hold the record.
State and concept capture shall live in the Vault, cloned from its archive.
To orient within the Vault, the Hand shall read the root, which links to every per-folder index; then the reference articles and framing notes, the active long-form plans of the incubating folder, and the completed records of the released folder.
The operational folders are not canonical for method, yet they are canonical for state: for what was decided, what was captured, and what remains pending. No agent shall treat them as mere scratch.
Descriptions shall be drawn in order.
When any of these files is listed or summarised, its description shall be drawn from a fixed order of preference.
The description is taken first from the YAML frontmatter description field, if present; failing that, from the first H1 after any frontmatter block; failing that, from the first non-empty line of body content.
This is the convention the archived summary tool once used. Carrying it forward in prose keeps frontmatter discoverable by hand-rolled tooling without binding the work to any single server implementation.
This inventory shall reside in the Canon.
This inventory shall dwell in the Canon and not in the harness.
The harness changes at the pace of a session; the Vault changes without cease. This inventory shall change only when a whole category of canonical material is added, removed, or restructured.
Such change is the work of method, and method belongs to the Canon. Here it shall remain.
These Articles may be amended in the open, as a charter shows its revisions.
The cursor waits for the next hand.