| name | artifex-invariants |
| description | The 7 non-negotiable Artifex design invariants. Use BEFORE writing or reviewing any code in packages/worker/** or anything touching the meta-agents (Orchestrator, Agent Creator, Reviewer, Learning Agent), Constitution, Context Broker, Worker Swarm, the mission loop, verification gates, or the audit ledger. Triggers on "invariant", "constitution", "gate A/B", "fold-up", "context broker", "learning agent", "ledger", or editing worker/meta-agent code. |
Artifex invariants
A change that breaks one of these is wrong regardless of how clean it looks. Canonical source: ARCHITECTURE.md.
- One substrate. Every action, verdict, and decision is appended to the audit ledger. The dashboard renders ledger events and persists nothing; human actions are first-class ledger events.
- No work without a contract. Nothing executes without acceptance criteria, boundaries, stopping conditions, and a budget — authored by the level above. The mission is task zero.
- Verify both ends. Gate A audits atomicity/coverage before execution; Gate B checks completion against the contract after.
- The learner does not own the yardstick. The Learning Agent may rewrite prompts/playbooks/taxonomies — never the constitutional core (metrics, review independence, ledger integrity, budget). Amendments are propose-only.
- Permanence is earned. Designs/knowledge are ephemeral by default; promote on measured, replicated evidence (by clade), down-weight losers, never hard-delete.
- No peer chatter. Agents exchange context only through the Context Broker; every exchange is logged. No direct memory-fabric reads from a specialist, no agent-to-agent side channels.
- Effort is a currency. Tasks carry budget floors and ceilings; optimize value-per-effort.
If a task seems to require breaking one of these, stop and surface it — don't quietly route around the invariant.
