experiment:
  name: Ghostlight
  status: incubation
  phase: phase_0_scaffold
  premise: >
    Build a durable research and implementation home for socially persistent
    generative agents whose behavior emerges from latent state, culture,
    memory, perception, and incentives rather than flat persona prompts.

objective:
  primary: >
    Turn Ghostlight into a legible machine for persistent autonomous social
    agents that can support Aetheria content generation, dialogue scaffolding,
    procedural drama, and eventual live-world simulation without collapsing
    into prompt soup.
  current: >
    Freeze the first canonical agent-state schema and validation seam, then use
    it as the contract for perceived-state overlays, classifier/event records,
    prompt projection, and authoring-oriented drama generation.

constraints:
  - Prefer explicit latent state over persona theater.
  - Culture should shape priors and incentives, not stamp out clones.
  - Prompt text is a projection surface, not the canonical store of truth.
  - Keep persistent state small enough to rehydrate without drowning the next session.
  - Reuse proven machinery where it fits before inventing ornate nonsense.
  - Do not treat an older corridor-crisis game slice as the active Ghostlight implementation target.
  - Do not use the obsolete Call of the Void colony-fleet return-home twist; current Aetheria canon sequesters the whole Solar system into Elysium.

invariants:
  - The map is canonical and slow-changing.
  - Scratch is temporary and disposable.
  - Evidence is durable and distilled.
  - Canonical agent state and per-agent perceived state must remain distinct.
  - Listener misread is part of the model, not an error to flatten away.
  - Personality must be modeled as layered organization, presentation, and situational activation, not just one bag of labels.
  - Authoring outputs must remain explainable in terms of state, relationship, pressure, memory, and goals.
  - Dialogue generation should be character-local: each prompt should restrict context to what the speaking character knows, feels, wants, remembers, hides, and perceives.

data_flow:
  observe:
    - research notes
    - implementation artifacts
    - simulation requirements
    - setting constraints
    - AetheriaLore source context
  process:
    - rehydrate from canonical state
    - work one bounded organ
    - verify the seam that matters
    - distill only belief-changing evidence
    - commit or cut the branch
  cut:
    - kill machinery that does not visibly serve the core model
    - move volatile proof to git history or artifacts, not durable notes
    - remove active scenario assumptions when the user redirects the product target

active_subgoals:
  - Keep Ghostlight as the canonical home for its architecture notes so consumer projects do not quietly regrow duplicate brains.
  - Define the canonical agent state model, including first-class volatility, attachment-seeking, and distance-seeking.
  - Define how culture shapes priors, incentives, masks, and economic behavior without turning populations into clones.
  - Define the boundary between canonical signal, perceived signal, and prompt projection.
  - Support content generation for the Call of the Void slice in AetheriaLore and dialogue scaffolding or procedural drama for narrated Aetheria timeline stories.

accepted_design:
  - Ghostlight owns the deeper agent-state, personality, culture, relationship, and prompt-projection architecture; other projects can remain consumers instead of shrines.
  - Personality is layered: underlying organization, stable dispositions, behavioral dimensions, presentation strategy, situational activation, relationship state, and goals or values.
  - The agent model must distinguish canonical state from per-agent perceived state.
  - Prompts are rendered projections of perceived state, active memory, and scene pressure; they are not the authoritative store of truth.
  - Culture acts as a prior-shaping and incentive field with distributions, covariance, scripts, reward gradients, taboo maps, and prestige structure.
  - Synthetic dialogue from known hidden state is a valid bootstrap source for training signal classifiers, but utterances themselves are not ground truth.
  - Performance, concealment, and mask maintenance are signal, not just obstruction.
  - The near-term Aetheria consumer is authoring support: Call of the Void content generation plus narrated timeline dialogue and procedural drama scaffolding.
  - Ghostlight should build drama and narrative pressure, then project character-local dialogue contexts so characters can breathe and act from their own partial state.
  - Call of the Void pressure should come from Sol's whole unresolved inheritance being trapped inside Elysium, not from a lone expedition discovering there is no way home.
  - The first schema contract lives in schemas/agent-state.schema.json with required first-class dimensions in schemas/agent-state.required-fields.json and a validator in tools/validate_agent_state.py.
  - Canonical authored character variables do not carry certainty; perceived dimensions do not expose canonical mean or plasticity, and instead model observed activation, attributed disposition, and confidence.
  - Fundamental attribution bias is first-class in perceived state: observers can mistake exceptional behavior for stable character, with stubborn reads emerging from confidence drivers such as memory, stakes, emotion, prejudice, and social reinforcement.
  - Voice style is a broad required communication vector covering lyrical speech, formality, verbosity, hedging, coded politeness, theatricality, dialect, register switching, technical compression, ritualized address, and related language mechanics.
  - Defensive verbal responses are derived during projection from underlying organization, dispositions, behavioral dimensions, presentation strategy, situational pressure, relationship context, and voice style rather than stored as a separate canonical layer.
  - Sarcastic deflection, sincerity evasion, emotional evasion, banter-as-boundary, and verbal aggression are target emergent behaviors for projection tests.
  - Dialogue context packs are positive-context payloads; unknown or author-only material is omitted rather than listed as forbidden context, while known secrets are handled through goals, memories, beliefs, and presentation constraints.
  - Relationship stance is directional; reciprocal agent pairs need separate edges because trust, fear, obligation, dependence, and betrayal expectations are not symmetric by default.
  - Prompt projection should compile state into speaker-local pressure prose through input selection, active-pressure scoring, tension detection, response affordance derivation, compact prompt rendering, and post-generation evaluation.
  - Projection distillation is the long-term optimization path: a frontier teacher model generates reviewed projection artifacts, and a smaller student projector is trained only after the artifact schema, deterministic input slicer, and evaluator are stable.
  - Behavioral warmth and verbal warmth are separate axes: `interpersonal_warmth` describes social care or welcome, while `verbal_warmth` describes soft or reassuring language surface.
  - Events can carry lightweight observed exchange, private interpretation, and event-effect scaffolding so prompt projection can reason from appraisal and consequence without pretending the v0 schema is already a full transition engine.
  - Future social-simulation mechanisms should be documented and tested through projection artifacts before promotion into the canonical schema.

current_status:
  summary: Ghostlight now has the Epiphany-style persistence spine, the first architecture payload, the v0 canonical agent-state schema seam, prompt projection docs, immediate schema fixes from evaluation, and a documented teacher/student distillation path for projection.
  next_action: Define the projection example schema and create the first reviewed Cat/Oz projection artifacts from the Call of the Void fixture.