@cratylus/canon

The meaning concern of cratylus — the canon of discovered Cratylic names, each read in its concept's bounded context, authored as typed TypeScript.

The discipline is cratylic context design: describing the vocabulary a foundation model already holds, rather than authoring prose and hoping it lands. An agent or skill in the canon is therefore not a prompt. It is a vector of values over the catalog's factors, and the markdown an agent harness reads is a projection of these modules.

Canon is harness-agnostic and runtime-agnostic: it says what an agent is and what a skill means, never how either is carried. Installing the canon on a machine is the cratylus README's. This README is for whoever works on the canon.

What it is to the command

The package's default export is canon as an agent-plugin: the canon the cratylus command is built with, which cratylus install projects and places.

Addressing is by imported binding, never a string id. That holds one level down too: a role profile or a persona imports each value it states, so composition is checked by the compiler rather than resolved by a registry, and every part of a composite is traceable to its one home.

What the plugin carries

| field | what it is | | ---------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | manifest | which factors exist — 18, in six groups; enforcement level is an attribute of every value | | events | which lifecycle events exist — the canon's harness-agnostic event vocabulary | | rulesets | which rulesets exist — the named sets of rules an install offers (src/rulesets.ts) | | factors | the factors' values, filed one directory per factor | | agents | the composed agents: five generic holders of their roles, and three personas | | skills | the skills — each a self-sufficient formal block, citing related skills inside it at the borrowing term (@ <skill>); formalize alone composes siblings (conceptualize and signify) |

Canon owns the catalog because a factor is constitutive: declaring one makes it part of the canon's agent design. The manifest rides the plugin rather than living in the projector, so the design — and a factor added to it — changes without editing the tool that renders it. The shapes the canon's units are authored against, and defineAgentPlugin that declares the plugin, are @cratylus/schema's.

The agents

The plugin carries eight agents: the industry roles of behaviour-driven development, each a generic holder of its role, and three personas over the business analyst. An install places every one. Each role is invoked by its industry name and defined by what it receives and what it hands back, never by steps. Its profile states only cratylus's departures from the industry's role, each by its Cratylic name, as the context-engineering ruleset's Cratylic context design and maxim of quantity hold. The practice itself, behaviour-driven development, is adopted by the project's conventions (the offered behaviour-driven-development ruleset), not by the agents. The departures follow the domain model's records: decision rights as one RAPID letter per decision class, autonomy as mission command, reach open by default (so no role narrows it), the domain model as every reader's memory, a user story free-form and unestimated, sign-off and tailoring as cratylus records them.

• business-analyst — holds the domain model, design/model/: turns the product owner's intent into concepts, user stories and examples, answers meaning questions, and confirms a realization means what was intended; decides meaning only, and backbriefs the product owner.
• tech-lead — holds a user story's realization: decides how it is built, hands its tasks to software engineers and its examples to the test engineer, joins the changes as the story's risk calls for (Ship, Show or Ask), and hands back the outcome.
• software-engineer — realizes one task and hands back one change.
• test-engineer — writes an acceptance test for each example and gives the verdict whether the realization passes.
• code-reviewer — reviews one change against its user story's acceptance criteria and examples, and hands back one code review.

The test engineer and the code reviewer run on another model family than the software engineers where one is available. A role profile (src/roles/<role>.ts) states a value for every factor, an explicitly empty set counting as one, and its mark; agents/<role>.ts is holder(<role>Role): named for the role, carrying nothing beyond it, its mark the role's. holder refuses a profile missing a factor, a scalar without exactly one value, a required slot not filled exactly once (an objective's drive is optional, stated only where it departs, and a role holds a decision-rights letter only in the decision classes it has a part in), and empty guardrails.

kino, nico and mav are personas over the business analyst role, each named for its expertise (kino film production and generative video, nico terminology, giving each concept its Cratylic name, mav software engineering). The business analyst role holds the domain model of every context it is given; a persona brings its expertise and owns nothing its role does not. Each is persona(businessAnalystRole, overrides), stating only its overrides and extensions of the role: an agent named as an individual, with a description and a mark of its own beside the values it states. A single value it states replaces the role's, a slot only its own slot; a set value is added after the role's, and restating one the role holds changes only its enforcement level or note. It never states the role itself, since the contract is the role's. Composition refuses a malformed persona: one that states the role, names a factor or slot the catalog does not have, removes a value its role does not hold, or has no mark or its role's; the CompositionRefusal it throws names what it refused. A persona that removes or lowers a guardrail, or removes a value from a set other than its reach, is made, and composition warns (a CompositionWarning), naming what it changed: no harm from one is on record.

A composed agent also says, for the projector, the role it holds (holds), its model's tier and effort (routing) and its typed handoff (contract). Nothing narrows its tools or whom it may dispatch: every agent keeps the agent harness's defaults. Its key is reserved for ipseic agents and is empty. holder, persona, CompositionRefusal, the five role profiles and MANIFEST are also named exports, for a plugin that composes agents of its own over these roles.

Typed handoffs

An assignment and a deliverable are values of their factors, and each carries its contract as JSON Schema data (src/contracts.ts, exported as ASSIGNMENT_CONTRACTS and DELIVERABLE_CONTRACTS by the value's term). Composition copies the pair onto the agent as contract. Each handoff states what it must contain (? marks an optional field, [≥1] a list that may not be empty):

| Role | Assignment | Deliverable | | ----------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | tech-lead | user story {story, slice, why, acceptanceCriteria[≥1], outOfScope, examples?}, or a task with no story (below) | outcome {story, joined, criteria[≥1], meaningQuestions, followUps} | | software-engineer | task {task, story?, goal, changes, done} | change {change, tests, verified} | | test-engineer | examples {story, examples[≥1]} | acceptance tests {story, tests: [{example, test, seenFailing, passes?}]} | | code-reviewer | review request {change, story?, acceptanceCriteria?, examples?} | code review {verdict, findings, meaningQuestions} |

An example is named <context>/<concept>, standing for all the examples of a concept file of design/model/, or <context>/<concept>: <example name> for one, such as delivery/install: installs the industry roles. The tech lead's assignment takes either form, stated as alternatives (anyOf); it fits when it fits any one. Its outcome names the user story, or for a task with no story the task, says whether the work was merged or dropped, and holds each acceptance criterion (or, for a task, what done means) with whether it holds and its evidence. An acceptance test's passes is absent before the build. A code review's verdict is approve or changes. The business analyst's handoffs are the product owner's — free-text intent in, a backbrief out — so it carries no contract. An agent harness binds the deliverable as its own output schema and shows every session, each turn, the assignment form of each agent that takes one: one fenced assignment JSON block in the dispatch text.

Evaluation and persona drift

Every agent's behaviour is evaluated in real use, by the product owner working with it: its evaluation factor holds the one value in-use, and no guard, hook or model-judged check holds its acts or its replies. Persona drift is a concept of the agent design context, judged by the product owner in real use; no agent carries countermeasure text against it.

The first principle

The first principle, the dense cratylism axiom, has its one literal home in genus/prime-principle.ts and is not stamped on every unit of the canon. It rides only the units whose laws apply it: the skills that give a concept its term, judge a term by its symmetric difference from the concept or confirm it by a fresh reading set it as their preamble, and an agent carries it once, by its name, as the cratylism stance of the role it holds, where that role states it. A unit that does not use it never holds a host's own authored surfaces to the canon's naming axiom. The axiom states cratylism as cratylic context design holds it: names are natural to the model, whose semantic space already fixes each name's meaning, so each concept takes its Cratylic name, the term whose meaning, read in the concept's domain, has the smallest symmetric difference from it; intuition proposes and a fresh reading confirms; the name is found, never coined, a coined name only where no established term covers the concept; its precising definition is stated beside it, stating what holds where the name lacks or adds, each once; and a kept name short of it is recorded as such. It is intrinsic to those units' projected bytes, so it survives deployment into a foreign repository rather than depending on ambient context.

Because the plugin object loses its package-root provenance when a consumer imports it, the directory fields are resolved against import.meta.url at definition time and consumed verbatim.

Dependencies, stated plainly

@cratylus/schema for the shapes of the canon's units and for defineAgentPlugin, which declares the plugin at its entry. Canon reaches the projector as data — the canon is passed to it as a plugin — and no unit imports it.

No unit imports the runtime either. A skill names the capability it routes to — model or versionSkew, the two built into the runtime — as runtime: { capability: … }, never its implementation, and a hook declaration that emits shell invoking the binary carries it as a fact the projector substitutes at emission. That is the architecture's highest-ranked property — meaning and mechanism never referencing each other.