An operating system for agents

Why is meclaw-os cut into four nested levels instead of one flat agent? Because one rule decides where a thing belongs: a level owns what its siblings must share. Put a thing one level too low and it is duplicated or lost when a part is replaced; put it one level too high and two siblings get one answer to a question that was theirs.

The rule at work

Memory belongs to the person, not to their agent, so memory-hive hangs at the member level. Replacing an assistant does not take the history with it, and two assistants of one person read one record (crates/meclaw-cells/tests/gh302_member_holds_the_memory.rs).

Screening and channels belong to the person for the same reason. A new generation meets the attacker record and the rate window the old one left behind, and one chat account reaches two of that person’s agents (crates/meclaw-cells/tests/gh454_two_assistants_one_channel.rs).

The control loop and the authoring path sit at the shell, because one colony has one charter and one place a submission lives. A person’s own keys are held one level down, by the member whose agents authenticate with them (templates/member/README.md).

An organisation shares a name and a boundary and nothing else, so that level owns nothing else. templates/org/template.json ships no cell at all: one hive, one open container, transit edges derived from what the member below accepts and emits (crates/meclaw-cells/tests/gh302_org_is_a_namespace.rs).

The assistant level is the one place that references both halves of a generation, which makes it the level that can give each half its own model (one assistant, two brains).

What the levels do not decide

None of these authorities asks a model. access answers a capability request by comparison and hands out a handle, firewall measures size, sender, forbidden literal and rate and names the row that fired, and session-keeper ends a session by arithmetic, on the pattern of a phone call. argus is the control loop, and everything it could pursue ships switched off: both rows in templates/argus/charter/seed/goals.jsonl carry "enabled": 0, so a freshly grown shell measures nothing until an operator turns one on (prepared for self-improvement).

What is rudimentary about it

The tree ships one app and one screen layout, and what an app may offer a member is still moving (ROADMAP). Nothing in a colony is ever deleted, so a generation you regret stays on disk, disconnected.

The levels, their occupants and the mutation that grows each are on meclaw-os.