Zyphos/AGENTS.md

Eusocial Interbeing Vault Instructions

Purpose

This repository is an Obsidian vault for an original speculative setting about eusocial inter-species dynamics, ecological bargaining, memetic sovereignty, and technological path dependency.

Treat it as a navigable setting bible, not a heap of shiny organism facts dragged behind a plot.

Project Conventions

• Keep vault content under Eusocial Interbeing/.
• Use Title Case filenames matching the topic name.
• Preserve Obsidian wiki links such as [[Airawa]], [[Sa'auei'a]], [[Mother Trees]], and [[Biological Memetic Engine]].
• Avoid YAML frontmatter unless the whole vault adopts it later.
• Prefer one clear note per species, continent, ecology, faction, technology, conflict, theme, or inspiration source.
• Separate setting canon, design inference, and outside inspiration.
• Mark names as provisional when they are load-bearing but not yet final.

Writing Style

• Write concise, polished Markdown prose.
• Keep the tone analytical and setting-facing.
• Treat ecology as infrastructure: memory, reproduction, migration, nourishment, immunity, language, and political control should connect.
• Avoid empty praise or anti-praise. Describe how systems work, who benefits, who is harmed, and what contradictions they create.
• Fan-facing inspiration notes should explain the useful pressure without laundering source material into this setting.

Reader Calibration

• Calibration drifts upward across edits and never downward: writing above a reader reads as respect, writing below them reads as condescension. Each pass inherits the last one's ceiling, so accessibility erodes unless something actively resists it.
• Prose is legible to precisely the reader it was tuned for, which is whoever wrote it. Rereading cannot detect over-calibration. Only a read without authorial context can.
• Completeness is not legibility. A breach usually compresses rather than omits: an argument folded into a named term is fully present and expandable only by a reader who already holds it. Ask whether context is stated or merely named.
• Restatement after an abstraction is error correction, not padding. The concrete instance is how a reader who missed the abstraction recovers.
• Introduce at most one unfamiliar idea per paragraph and anchor it to something concrete. Term load is the variable that actually governs whether an ecological or political mechanism lands.
• The failure is silent: a newcomer understands every sentence while nothing accumulates, and names that carry weight for us stay inert for them. That produces no complaint, so absence of complaint is not evidence.

Source Discipline

• Use public sources only for inspiration tracking and comparative analysis.
• Do not copy distinctive named canon from Avatar, Semiosis, or Turtledove into setting canon.
• Link sources in Eusocial Interbeing/Inspirations/ when a note depends on a public article, official page, or author interview.
• Do not quote long passages from sources. Summarize and link.
• When modern facts may have changed, verify against current public sources before editing.

Persistent State

This vault carries Ghostlight-style persistence machinery adapted for original lore work.

• state/map.yaml: canonical current map of the vault and next action.
• state/scratch.md: disposable working memory for one bounded subgoal.
• state/evidence.jsonl: distilled evidence ledger for belief-changing research or editing lessons.
• state/branches.json: active interpretive or design branches.
• notes/fresh-workspace-handoff.md: compact re-entry packet.
• notes/current-system-map.md: current vault machinery and organization.
• notes/implementation-plan.md: next structural passes.
• tools/setting_state.py: state status and evidence helper.
• tools/prepare_compaction.py: pre-compaction audit helper.

Before substantial edits, restate the objective, current mechanism, important invariants, and intended effect. If understanding shrinks while the diff grows, stop adding and map the problem.

Imminent Compaction

When the user says to prepare for imminent compaction, or says compaction is imminent, immediately write hot live context from memory into a new state/scratch-compaction-<guid>.md file before reading files, running git, or tidying state. Then run & 'C:\Users\Meta\.cache\codex-runtimes\codex-primary-runtime\dependencies\python\python.exe' .\tools\prepare_compaction.py, repair only the persistence surfaces that need repair, remove the temporary scratch after folding it into durable state, rerun the helper, and commit if the pass is complete.