Writing conventions for kb/agentic-systems/

Type: types/collection-contract.md

Purpose and quality

This collection holds ordinary authored accounts of external agentic systems, comparisons and the comparison procedures. The operator's primary research purpose, supplied on 2026-10-05, is to chart the design space and find solutions useful to Commonplace; a useful public database is secondary. Source accounts and comparisons support that purpose while keeping Commonplace fit judgments in separately commissioned transfer scans.

The quality goal for system accounts is fidelity and economy: explain the external system's native operation before applying Commonplace concepts. Qualify uncertain mappings. Open authored analyses with their evidence basis and capture boundary. Memory and knowledge are lenses of whole systems; the agent-memory-systems corpus is historical. New workflow analyses belong in kb/agentic-system-analyses/.

Placement and ownership

The root holds README.md, COLLECTION.md and the public methods/data entrance. topics/ holds research-question landing pages linking comparisons and accepted members, not duplicate system accounts. reviews/ holds ordinary authored accounts. comparisons/ holds cross-system analyses and generated tables, in one subdirectory per analysis lens (runtime/, memory/, epistemic/, workflow/). Each lens directory has an authored README; the site generates its list of current members at build time. comparisons/builds.md owns dataset selection, interpretation and regeneration. The public menu links overview, topics, comparisons, the generated systems directory and methods/data rather than exposing the internal lens layout. instructions/ owns landscape synthesis and taxonomy maintenance. reports/ is frozen history from before the analysis collection existed; it is excluded from validation and from comparison. types/ owns local types for artifacts that remain here. There are no nested collection contracts. Research skill projections point to canonical instructions; these skills are not promoted to every initialized KB.

Before editing instructions, shared contracts or local types, follow method maintenance. Use the instruction type's executability and composition rules when authoring procedures. Supply each worker's required role/type inputs explicitly. Instruction edits require checking direct callers, callees, conditional loads and result consumers; update affected interfaces together. Method-maintenance guidance must be loaded through an explicit instruction-authoring path, not by analyst packets.

Workflow analyses

Workflow-produced analyses, their method and their publication belong to kb/agentic-system-analyses/. Comparison tools read the current analyses from that collection's retained/ area. When a system is regenerated there, its authored account here is retired with the relocation command. Ordinary authored accounts remain author-maintained.

Before assessing theory pathways in ordinary authored accounts, read the Theory account in the shared record contract. It supplies the independent conditions and separately evidenced properties.

Scope and titles

Durable analysis excludes current Commonplace differences, adoption advice and watch items. Those belong in separately commissioned transfer scans under kb/reports/state/agentic-system-transfer/. Transferable claims go to kb/theory/, raw captures to source snapshots, descriptions of Commonplace to kb/reference/, and in-flight work to kb/work/.

Descriptive account titles name the system or feature. Argumentative accounts use a claim-shaped title and the title-as-claim trait. Procedures use imperative titles and trigger descriptions. Comparison titles name their question and scope.

  • Sources: tracked ingests, never snapshots; derived-from, evidenced-by, see-also.
  • External: source evidence already used, preferably version-pinned; evidenced-by, see-also.
  • Theory: theoretical mappings; rests-on, defined-in, rare is-evidence-for, see-also.
  • Agent-memory systems: related subsystem accounts; contains, part-of, compares-with, see-also.
  • Agentic system analyses: accepted overview/member evidence; see-also.
  • Reports: separately retained evidence; evidenced-by, see-also.
  • Reference: direct Commonplace analogues; see-also.
  • Instructions: directly mapped procedures; procedure, see-also.
  • Local instructions: composition, conditions and operation targets; composition, precondition, invokes, applies-when, operates-on, rests-on, see-also. Do not use review, archive or workshop links as method execution inputs.