Overview

Goals and non-goals

Goals:

• Hold the constitution: the few stable principles and the governance rules (what binds whom, what only a person may decide, how rules and the constitution change). It names no concrete practice: no command, storage place or tool.
• Hold the general rule library and general skills: the concrete practices that refine the constitution, written without one user’s machines, accounts or history. The rules are a default set; each jurisdiction chooses which of them it uses.
• Ship the toolchain that turns those sources, plus a private overlay, into the one instruction file the coding agents read, and the checkers that keep the sources, the overlay and the output consistent.
• Be publishable as is. Every file is written so that the repo can be made public without rewriting history.

Non-goals:

• Holding anything private: machine names, accounts, secret-store paths, issue numbers, conversation history, who said what and when. That lives in the private overlay.
• Holding a compiled artifact for a real user. Real output is built on the user’s side and never committed here.
• Enforcing anything at runtime. Permissions, branch protection and harness settings do that; this repo produces text and checks text. Each checker below says what it cannot prove.
• Building the feedback pipeline (events, proposals, automatic adoption) now. This document only reserves its places and interfaces.
• Depending on any orchestrator. See “Relation to fleet”.

Two layers

The overlay never changes or relaxes the constitution. It chooses which general rules it uses (division-of-instructions.rules; see Choosing rules), adds private rules and fills in parameters. It never edits core files; it pins a core version and builds against it.

Language

The constitution and the general rules are kept in English and Chinese. Every other file here (the skills, the tools, this design) is in English.

Why two languages: the person who approves the constitution and the rules reads Chinese much faster than English, and that review is the one place where a person’s attention matters most. A Chinese version also helps readers of the public repo. English stays the default: it is what a public reader can be assumed to read, and it is the first language in the constitution’s index.toml.

Why the rest stays English: skills are installed as they are and tools are code; one language there means one text to keep correct. The compiled instruction file is built in one language, which the overlay selects, so an agent reads one text. A rule is cited by ID from repo files, reviews and tickets in either language; the ID, not the wording, carries the reference.

Both languages live in the same source file, as two keys of the same TOML table (see Source formats), so one change edits both and a reviewer sees them side by side.

The standing of the constitution’s texts in its languages is set by the constitution itself (amendment-languages, equal-languages), as drafted; it stays open until a person approves that text. The rules follow the same terms. What this repo adds:

• The checker only proves structural alignment (every text table has every language; the languages define the same IDs in the same order and cite the same IDs). There is no check, based on the git diff, that a change touching one language also touches the other: fixing a typo in one language only is a legitimate change, and such a check would block it or teach people to make empty edits. Review covers meaning.
• The Chinese text follows the typography that limae checks with its default rules (Checkers): full-width commas, full stops, enumeration commas, semicolons and colons; half-width parentheses with one space outside. Item numbers render half-width for the same reason, (**三**) .