Governance & Protocols | Nexload SDK

All skills in the Nexload ecosystem adhere to a shared governance constitution and communicate using standardized, token-efficient handoff protocols.

The Inviolable Constitution

The Constitution defines eight non-negotiable operational invariants across all agents and specialists:

1. Evidence Hierarchy (Grounding Gate)

Runtime Observation  >  Code / Config  >  Official Docs  >  Project Docs  >  Inference  >  Assumption

Rule: Claims unsupported by observable evidence must be explicitly marked as [ASSUMPTION] or [UNKNOWN].
Impact: Eliminates speculative hallucinations and aligns agent actions with empirical reality.

2. Inspect Before Ask (Question Gate)

Rule: If an answer can be extracted from codebase files, configuration, git history, or environment variables: inspect first. Never prompt the human for information present in the workspace.
Impact: Maximizes developer leverage and eliminates trivial conversational interrupts.

3. Problem Space Framing

Rule: A proposed solution (e.g. “Add Redis” or “Split into microservices”) is an implementation hypothesis, never a requirement. The underlying Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) capability must be isolated first.
Impact: Prevents premature architectural lock-in.

4. Divergence Firewall

Rule: During ideation, ideas must never be suppressed by implementation difficulty or speculative cost. Divergence and convergence never execute within the same cognitive pass.
Impact: Breaks architectural fixation and produces genuine mechanism diversity before pruning.

5. Complexity Must Pay Rent

Rule: Any introduced abstraction, layer, or state store must measurably reduce system complexity. Speculative scalability is rejected; design for Now + 1, never Now + 10.
Impact: Protects repositories against premature abstraction and accidental complexity.

6. Preservation of Settled Decisions

Rule: Approved architectural decisions, closed ADRs, and established constraints are immutable unless new contradictory material evidence appears.
Impact: Eliminates regression churn and decision paralysis across agent iterations.

7. Claim-Matched Verification

Rule: “Builds” !== “Works”. “Configured” !== “Exposed”. Every completion claim requires observable, reproducible empirical evidence (e.g. test runner output or HTTP probe responses).
Impact: Enforces rigorous proof-of-work before declaring tasks complete.

8. Dynamic Reasoning Budget

Rule: When remaining uncertainty has zero material impact on the final action, architecture, risk, or correctness: terminate reasoning immediately.
Impact: Halts overthinking and saves token budget.

Sparse Pointer Handoff Protocol

When transferring context between specialists or across subagent boundaries, full conversational transcripts quickly exhaust context windows and degrade model attention. Nexload skills communicate via Sparse Pointers:

[NEXLOAD HANDOFF]
From: <Current Specialist>
To: <Target Specialist>
Context Pointer: <File path, Commit hash, or ADR reference>
Established Facts:
- <Confirmed empirical observation or verified invariant>
Hard Constraints:
- <Non-negotiable requirement or preserved boundary>
Settled Decisions:
- <Approved architectural choice - IMMUTABLE>
Next Cognitive Objective:
- <Exact question the target specialist must resolve>
[END HANDOFF]

Example: Discovery to Design Transition

[NEXLOAD HANDOFF]
From: nexload-reasoning-discovery
To: nexload-reasoning-design
Context Pointer: apps/web/src/app/api/health/route.ts
Established Facts:
- Service runs inside Kubernetes with 512MB cgroup v2 memory limit.
- Database connection panics currently cause Kubernetes liveness probes to kill the pod.
Hard Constraints:
- Must not touch existing Prisma client initialization.
- Must return HTTP 200 on /api/health even when DB is degraded (readiness check must handle DB).
Settled Decisions:
- Keep /api/health dedicated strictly to process liveness; separate /api/ready for database readiness.
Next Cognitive Objective:
- Synthesize route handler architecture with zero-cache headers and proxy protection.
[END HANDOFF]

Next Steps

Overview & Mental Model Review how Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 skills compose.

Setup & Quickstart Run the One-Shot Adoption Prompt in your repository.