Agent Tradition

Agent Tradition: institutional memory for AI coding agents

What this is

A small, portable _meta/ layer you drop into any repo. It gives an AI agent the three things a new teammate would get on day one but an agent normally never gets: why this project exists, what we currently believe works, and the scars from everything we already tried. Plain text files, version-controlled, read at the start of work and written at the end. No service, no database required.

The problem it solves: agent amnesia

Every session, a coding agent wakes up with zero memory. It re-derives the same architecture, re-proposes a rejected approach, re-walks a wall someone already bruised on, and re-learns a lesson that cost real hours last week. The intelligence is high; the continuity is zero. Tradition is the continuity layer: the part of the mind that persists when the session ends, so judgment compounds instead of resetting to blank every time.

The five-file vocabulary

Five files under _meta/, each answering a different question. Together they're the institutional memory; apart, each changes a specific decision.

• telos.md: WHY this repo exists. One or two stable sentences of purpose (not goals, not tasks). Changes in years, not weeks. It's the spine: it anchors every other file and tells an agent what "good" is even aimed at. Example: "A billing service whose single job is to never double-charge a customer."
• ethos.md: HOW work behaves unsupervised. Character, not rules. The disposition an agent brings before any specific rule applies: skeptical, evidence-seeking, minimal, honest about failure. Inherited and rarely edited. Where a rule is silent, ethos decides. Example: "Verify live; 'committed' is never 'done.'"
• doctrine.md: current FALSIFIABLE beliefs. Each entry is a standing bet: belief · confidence · evidence · what would falsify it · review date. This file is supposed to change. The discipline is the falsifier: an entry with no falsifier is faith, not doctrine. Example: "Postgres advisory locks are enough for our concurrency, falsified if we see a double-write under load test."
• canon/: narrative memory. Preserved stories of failures, breakthroughs, and precedents, kept with their context, conflict, and consequence, not flattened to a one-line rule. A rule says "don't delete that folder"; canon keeps why someone did, what it cost, and how it was recovered, so the judgment transmits, not just the prohibition. If it fits in one line, it belongs in doctrine, not here.
• phronesis.md: distilled judgment. Practical wisdom extracted ONLY from patterns that recurred across multiple sessions: one case is an anecdote, not phronesis. Every entry carries its own "danger of overgeneralizing" counter-indication, so the wisdom doesn't harden into dogma. Example: "Audit the premise before executing, but don't re-litigate well-specified, low-stakes asks."

The commission → chronicle work loop

Wrapped around substantial work are two units that turn a session into a reusable record:

• Commission (written BEFORE): the work order. Scope, granted authority, desired outcomes-as-end-states (not a step recipe), boundaries, and how "done" gets verified live. It grants authority and context, then leaves the path to the agent. If you're writing every step, you're writing a plan, not a commission.
• Chronicle (written AFTER): the honest "what actually happened" account: attempted, changed, verified-live, failed, deferred, and any disagreements with the ask. Not a success report; it must survive a future reality audit. The disagreements and failures are the most valuable part, because that's what the next agent inherits.

How to make it stick: hooks, not honor-system

Prose rules drift under load: an agent skips the file it was "supposed" to read. So the loop is hook-enforced, not aspirational. Three hooks (full spec in reference/adoption.md):

1. SessionStart: surface. Prints the telos chain and points the agent at ethos + doctrine + canon before any source work. The tradition can't be invisible.
2. PreToolUse (Write|Edit): commission-scaffold. On the first source edit of a session with no active commission, auto-creates a commission stub. No wall; it always allows the edit, it just refuses to let work start untracked.
3. Stop: chronicle-gate. A session that changed source cannot end until a chronicle exists. This is the load-bearing one: it's what forces memory to actually get written instead of evaporating with the context window.

How to adopt it in your repo

1. Create _meta/ with the five files. Generic fill-in-the-blank templates for all five (plus commission + chronicle) are in reference/adoption.md, copy them and replace the bracketed parts.
2. Add the three hooks to .claude/hooks/ and register them in .claude/settings.json (SessionStart / PreToolUse Write|Edit / Stop). The hook bodies + registration JSON are in reference/adoption.md.
3. Fill in telos.md first: it's the spine; the hooks key off its presence.
4. Seed ethos.md and doctrine.md from the baseline templates; leave canon/ and phronesis.md empty. They earn their entries from real sessions.
5. Commit _meta/. Never gitignore it: untracked memory is unrecoverable memory.

What NOT to do

• Don't flatten canon into rules. A one-line "don't do X" loses the context that makes the judgment transferable. Keep the story.
• Don't write doctrine without a falsifier. No "what would prove this wrong" = it's faith; move it to ethos or delete it.
• Don't promote one case to phronesis. Wait for the pattern to recur, and always attach the danger of overgeneralizing.
• Don't let it become a note-hoard. A file never read at the moment it would change a decision is rot. Every entry earns its place by changing behavior, or it's pruned.
• Don't write a chronicle that's all wins. If nothing failed and nothing was deferred, you're hiding something the next agent needs.
• Don't rely on honor-system reading. If a behavior must hold, it's a hook, not a sentence.