Principles & Foundations

These ten principles are the ontological spine of this scaffold. They describe invariants of structured cognitive work — properties that hold for any agent (human, AI, team) operating under finite attention on any filesystem, in any tool, in any year.

Read them in order for the first pass. The first three describe the shape of knowledge work. The next three describe the discipline it requires. The last four describe how this specific scaffold responds.

The shape of knowledge work

1. Capture → Work → Output — The three-regime flow that every serious framework reinvents.
2. Temperature Gradient — Access frequency is a load-bearing organizational signal.
3. Skills vs Agents — Passive expertise and active executors are structurally different things.

The discipline it requires

4. Progressive Disclosure — The only sustainable response to finite attention.
5. Convention as Compressed Decision — Why Chesterton’s fence protects scaffolds.
6. Single Canonical Addressability — Why hierarchy wins despite richer alternatives.

How this scaffold responds

7. Five Strata of Repeatability — What is portable vs what is not.
8. Four Channels of Context — How agent behavior is actually determined.
9. Meta / Self-Reference — Why kernel, stack, and work must be structurally separate.
10. Multi-Entity Design — Why humans and AI are both first-class consumers.

For the condensed version of all ten, see PHILOSOPHY.md.