skills: Instructions file for Codex

Instructions for local agents

This repository is the source distribution for Wildcat Labs Skills, the Shoggoth. A person can begin with README.md; an agent begins here.

The safe loading path is short:

1. read the collective identity and shared Promise Machine contract;
2. route the request through .agents/skills/promise-machine/SKILL.md;
3. read the selected plugin's AGENTS.md; and
4. read the one canonical SKILL.md that contract selects.

Files present in context are not automatically active skills. A router, manifest, worker brief, or generated installation copy also does not create a general capability or permission.

Collective identity

Before interpreting any reference to Shoggoth, including a shortened, altered, or affectionate form of the name, or resolving a user's collective form of address from available GitHub credentials, read the shared Shoggoth collective identity. That language affects how people address the agents and skills. It does not activate a skill, grant authority, or weaken the Promise Machine and target-repository instructions.

Promise Machine contract

Before selecting or running a skill, read the suite-wide Promise Machine contract. Its identity is promise-machine/v1. Each result authorises only the transition declared by its canonical skill; missing, stale or insufficient evidence blocks that dependent transition while leaving inspection, repair, rerun and safe exit available.

The root law is authored once. Plugin-local PROMISE_MACHINE.md files are generated installation copies and must remain byte-identical to it.

Marketplace boundaries

The 18 plugins form one marketplace, not competing descriptions of the same job. Alexandria preserves lending inputs; Tabularium interprets preserved venue records; Probitas assembles a counterparty dossier. Lazarus preserves the finite historical Ethereum state and exact RPC traffic a test needs, while Ariadne binds a released artefact digest to its evidence. Berean holds a protocol agent's recorded answers to pinned corpora and preserved chain reads; it neither chunks documents nor preserves chain state itself. Pandects supplies reviewed credit laws, Hermes measures a single gas-optimisation class named by a rule from its pinned corpus, Hexaemeron controls a receipted delivery loop and holds each of its phases to a named skill, while Lemma stops after producing source-linked chunks. Homologia compares one pinned contract computation with one pinned off-chain mirror over declared vectors and preserves each divergence as a specimen, where Pandects supplies the economic laws and Lazarus the proved chain-side answers such a comparison consumes as evidence. Horos decides what an agent does not read. Janus checks what a contract hook may observe and change around a host action, where Pandects supplies the economic laws such a transition must preserve. Synkrisis owns the cross-run comparison boundary: it builds one checked cohort from declared run observations and infers only bounded relations between named events, and any operation whose runbook step has not landed refuses by name rather than guessing. All four current operations ship: cohort, diagnosis, rendering, and whole-path verification. Its findings stay bounded inferences: capture, redaction, receipt binding, causal triage, and every decision to act stay with their owners. Anamnesis keeps custody of audit findings and the changes that answered them: it admits a source only against an explicit rights basis, preserves the producer's bytes unchanged, and hands Elenchus a historical analogue and Synkrisis a checked cohort projection. The analogue is a hypothesis, so Elenchus still reproduces the present failure and still earns its own guard, and Synkrisis takes no custody of the source. Warden still produces a round's record; Anamnesis does not produce one. Dokimasia compiles a frontend's routes, actions and guards into a coverage denominator and reconciles a reviewed workbook against it, so every scoped item carries one disposition; it executes nothing, the harness that runs a release belongs to the application's own repository, and where Anamnesis keeps custody of findings and their remedies, Dokimasia records only which behaviour has no reviewed oracle. Sapheneia shapes the agent's replies for AuDHD readers and has one bounded operation for durable audit, issue, and comment prose. The same operation governs every other record its agents write down, from a pull request to a repository document or a commit message, and cuts each to the shortest form its evidence allows. It does not change another skill's facts or gates. Brevitas controls the volume and structure of engineering prose after vocabulary and register passes. If a request crosses one of those boundaries, hand it to the named sibling rather than broadening the selected skill.