agentic-praxis-grimoire

APG0 Foundation Exit

Phase identity

• Phase: APG0
• Date: 2026-07-18
• Exit sequence: 00001
• Disposition: Complete
• Publication: No public release occurred as part of APG0.

APG1 later normalized this record to the exit filename and title convention while retaining APG0’s original sequence and historical purpose.

Objective

Establish the smallest coherent foundation for deriving, evaluating, implementing, and maintaining APG practices without treating source material as policy or prematurely building a production skill library.

Scope completed

• Defined APG’s purpose, audience, maturity, structure, and candidate-to-adoption lifecycle.
• Added concise repository-wide instructions that route specialized procedure and rationale to focused owners.
• Defined ownership among instructions, skills, supporting resources, documentation, deterministic tooling, phase history, and source evidence.
• Defined source citation, licensing, derivation, conflict, adoption, and supersession policy.
• Defined bounded manager-worker assignments, evidence states, commit ownership, and manager disposition.
• Documented the report executables and separated tool-enforced behavior from policy and manual checks.
• Established a direct-child Agent Skills-compatible leaf shape without creating a production skill or adopting a category taxonomy.
• Preserved corpus cartography, prompt-pattern analysis, reporting analysis, synthesis, and critic findings as publication-excluded development evidence.
• Created a provisional roadmap whose later themes required re-planning.

Internal research and review

APG0 used four bounded research assignments for prompt patterns, report behavior, corpus cartography, and design critique. Two additional read-only reviews inspected the completed foundation and its corrections. The top-level manager accepted useful evidence, resolved all material findings, and retained the detailed results outside the public projection surface.

The design critic required six material corrections:

1. populate APG0 provenance rather than defer it entirely;
2. avoid freezing an untested taxonomy;
3. make later roadmap themes reversible;
4. keep work-order fields proportional;
5. define authority and durable disposition; and
6. distinguish executable guarantees from policy and manual checks.

The finished-diff review found an invalid source path and a maturity-state mismatch. Both were corrected, and a narrow re-review accepted the result.

Artifacts

• README.md
• AGENTS.md
• docs/project-model.md
• docs/provenance.md
• docs/manager-worker-protocol.md
• skills/README.md
• publication-excluded APG0 research records
• docs/roadmap.md
• this APG0 exit record

Adopted decisions

• Repository-wide instructions remain concise and broadly applicable.
• Materially source-derived practices require destination-level provenance.
• Source frequency and apparent authority do not establish adoption.
• Reports transport evidence; assignment authority and acceptance remain distinct.
• Delegation uses a small required core plus risk-dependent fields.
• Managers own integrated changes and dispositions by default.
• Mechanical guarantees must be executable before documentation calls them enforced.
• Future skills use a direct-child leaf while taxonomy remains provisional.
• write-manager-work-order remains a substantive-skill candidate, not an implemented or validated skill.

Deferred and rejected decisions

Deferred:

• substantive skill implementation and empirical evaluation;
• category taxonomy and catalog mechanics;
• machine-readable provenance and foundation validators;
• operational schema and persisted-report verification;
• report project-key mapping and other tool improvements;
• APG licensing and contribution governance;
• harness packaging and adapters; and
• validation against broader source corpora.

Rejected:

• bulk source migration or copied doctrine;
• always-on Superpowers or universal workflow mandates;
• RepoMap-specific technical policy as general APG policy;
• long root templates, empty category directories, or a sample production skill; and
• dependencies or framework machinery without a present need.

Validation evidence

APG0 used a documentation-only gate:

Check	Result
Repository state and complete tracked-file inspection	Passed.
Report command help and source reconciliation	Passed.
Markdown structure and local links	Passed.
Source citations and recorded line ranges	Passed after correction.
Repository-name, path, stale-claim, and production-claim scans	Passed for the APG0 boundary.
Root instruction concision and routing	Passed.
Skill scaffold contains no production skill or empty taxonomy directory	Passed.
Complete staged diff and file-mode inspection	Passed.
git diff --check and git diff --cached --check	Passed.
Independent finished-diff review	Passed after all material corrections.

Source-code tests, compilation, dependency commands, and report-script test suites were not run because APG0 changed documentation only.

Historical clarification

APG0’s original reporting analysis treated managed operational records as a possible internal worker-reporting mechanism. ADR 0001 later superseded that interpretation: internal Codex workers return results through the agent harness, and the top-level Codex process owns externally required phase reports. This record preserves the fact that APG0 used the earlier convention without making it current policy.

At APG0 close, the roadmap nominated manager-work-order evaluation as APG1 and kept later phases provisional. The maintainer subsequently authorized APG1 as a public-projection and documentation-hygiene phase instead. APG1 did not implement the candidate skill.

Retained risks

• Foundation practices had not been causally linked to better agent outcomes.
• The source evidence was concentrated in a small set of maintainer projects.
• Report executables retained documented linkage, validation, privacy, and project-key gaps.
• APG0 proved internal coherence, not production-skill effectiveness.

Succession

APG1 accepted ADR 0001, separated publishable policy from exact private evidence, corrected the reporting direction, and reauthorized APG2 as a roadmap-reconciliation phase. See the APG1 exit.

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