Every skill on the surface lives in one of two homes. The official, shared set lives in executive. The operator-specific layer lives in creed. They are two parts of one operating model: Ordova, the AI operating system Async Digital runs on.
Ordova is built like a separation of powers. You legislate, the law is enforced, the work is recorded, and one layer is specific to the operator. Three of those parts are shared and civic. The fourth, creed, is the operator's own.
The law. Principles, invariants, and the discipline the studio works by.
The live config the agent runs under. It puts the charter into practice.
The memory. Handoffs, projects, notes, and the work as it happens.
The one operator-specific layer.
Executive is the agent's configuration made into a tracked, installable, version-controlled artefact: settings, agent definitions, rules, skills, and hooks. It is the generic core, the part that is the same for everyone and designed to be shared. On the skill surface, the official set lives here.
Its lifecycle runs at the pace of the work itself: a rule refined mid-session, an agent added once a task earns it, a hook fixed the moment it misfires. The official set is curated and signed off, so the right capability is always the documented one.
Creed is the operator-specific layer: operator skills, machine discipline, and operator-specific config. Where executive is the shared core, creed is the overlay laid on top. It is not generic, and it lives under the operator's own namespace, not the studio's.
These are the skills shaped around one operator's repos, vault, and way of working. They are real and used every day, but they belong to the operator, not the shared set.
On a machine the two are installed together. Executive provides the generic core, creed overlays the operator-specific layer, and the two compose into the agent's live configuration. Shared machinery that happens to depend on an operator's setup stays in executive behind guards, so it simply does nothing when creed is absent.
The result is a clean line drawn by one question: is this shareable, or is it operator-specific? Everything shareable is executive. Everything operator-specific is creed. On the skill surface every card is tagged with its home, so the line is always visible.