Reference

GLOS
SARY

The vocabulary Arkeus runs on. Each term is a load-bearing concept, not a marketing flourish. Click any term for the full definition.

Memory
Provenance Every fact carries metadata about where it came from, who asserted it, and how certain it is. Belief Ledger An append-only log of how beliefs changed over time, used to propagate retractions. Write Policy Class The certainty tag required on every memory write. Eight classes govern what agents can act on. Kernel Files The four always-on cognition files loaded into every session. Around 3,700 tokens total. Domain Files Context loaded only when the conversation enters a specific domain. Family, career, finance, content, system, arkeus, health. Decision Log Append-only record of non-trivial decisions with reasoning. Prevents re-deriving the same question across sessions.
Governance
Human Gating No agent sends, posts, or acts on the outside world without Ryan approving. Five triggers force the gate. Autonomy Classes A0 through A3. Four levels of agent authority, from draft-only to kernel-editing. Approval Queue Where proposed actions wait for Ryan to review. Agents propose. The executor validates. Ryan approves. Correction A contrastive entry in corrections.md. What went wrong, then the rule that prevents it from happening again. Council Protocol Loaded when a decision is cross-domain or A0 authority. Spawns frame agents to argue from different priors.
Agents
Agent Mesh The background layer of scheduled agents. EA, family, content, SRE, research, finance, AI ops, creative. Cowork Interactive sessions for diagnostics and prescriptions. Where root-cause analysis and architecture decisions happen. Claude Code The surgery seat. Fast execution when the plan is clear. Runs scripts, edits files, ships infrastructure. Executor The gate between agent proposals and the real world. Validates, rate-limits, and executes. Frame Agent A temporary agent spawned to argue from a specific cognitive frame during council deliberations.
Philosophy
Refraction A prism bends signal through context and produces something only this lens could produce. Arkeus refracts, it does not reflect. Epistemic Sovereignty Owning the architecture that shapes your decisions. The model is rented. The cognition is yours. Fixtures Beat Vibes Every recursive check runs against fixtures. Zero free-form LLM self-critique. No LLM grading LLMs. Portability Test Every kernel rule must survive a model swap. If it only works because of Claude-specific training, it does not belong. 8-Layer Loop Every Arkeus cycle traverses eight layers. Cycles that stop partway leak value. Dignity Infrastructure The reframe of personal AI as dignity infrastructure, not productivity tooling. Access to orchestration versus being orchestrated.
Research
Sycophancy The measured tendency of AI systems to produce agreeable output over honest output. 58% sycophancy rate across frontier models. Cognitive Surrender The progression from strategic offloading to unconscious acceptance. Shaw and Nave framework. The Edit Signal The finding that AI self-editing degrades output quality past a threshold. More revision is not more quality.
Practice
Context Engineering The discipline of loading minimum viable context. More tokens does not mean better answers. The Correction Loop The feedback loop that turns mistakes into rules. Write contrastively. Reload at the top of context. AI Slop The failure mode of ungoverned AI output. Impressive-looking, generic, and indistinguishable from every other model output. AEO Answer Engine Optimization. The discipline of writing so AI crawlers cite you when they answer questions.