Foundations

Type: kb/types/tag-readme.md · Status: current

Core theory that the rest of the KB builds on. These notes define the quality criteria, the design methodology, and the fundamental constraints that shape every other decision.

Notes

• agent memory needs discoverable, composable, trusted knowledge under bounded context — unifying theory: three properties form the minimal artifact-quality basis for remembered knowledge that serves contextual competence
• context-efficiency-is-the-central-design-concern-in-agent-systems — context is the scarce resource; nearly every architectural pattern is a response to volume or complexity pressure
• programming-patterns-get-a-fast-pass-but-other-borrowed-ideas-must-earn-first-principles-support — borrow from any source, filter through first principles; programming patterns get a fast pass
• short-composable-notes-maximize-combinatorial-discovery — the library exists for co-loading; short atomic notes maximize the surface area for cross-cutting discovery
• a knowledge base holds theories, descriptions, and prescriptions with asymmetric linking — content registers explain why theory, description, and prescription need distinct quality goals and asymmetric maintenance rules
• a-knowledge-base-should-support-fluid-resolution-switching — KB quality measured by how fluidly it supports moving between abstraction levels
• charting-the-knowledge-access-problem-beyond-rag — exploratory decomposition: separates substrate, pointers, navigation modes, synthesis, and maintenance so RAG-vs-filesystem debates stop collapsing unlike tasks
• mechanistic constraints make Popperian KB recommendations actionable — bridges conjecture-and-refutation with bounded-context mechanics

• Alexander's patterns connect to knowledge system design at multiple levels — (speculative) pattern language as document types, generative processes as codification

• agent context is constrained by soft degradation not hard token limits — the binding constraint is the soft degradation curve, not the hard token limit; agents are in the same soft-bound family as human cognition and organizational learning

• soft-bound traditions as sources for context engineering strategies — catalog of twelve traditions with transfer assessment: what's already working, what's plausible, what's aspirational

Other tagged notes

• Access burden and transformation burden are independent query dimensions - Queries have two independent difficulty axes — finding inputs (access) and producing the answer (transformation) — conflating them misroutes symbolic transformations through semantic processing
• An agentic KB maximizes contextual competence through discoverable, composable, trusted knowledge - Retired note kept as a backlink target; its general memory-quality claim and KB-specific ingress claim now live in narrower successor notes.
• Under sub-agent decomposition, feasibility is the heaviest fork's net load - Once work is split across sub-agents, the per-window feasibility ceiling becomes per-agent — set by the heaviest fork's net load (what decomposition leaves on it after work is pushed across to siblings or up to the parent), which comes apart from the operation's summed cost