Concepts

Six ideas explain most of the product.

The document

Markdown with front matter declaring spec: "1". Prose is prose. Fenced blocks with a kind, like :::must, carry meaning the specification defines: a rule becomes a labelled instruction when delivered. Blocks with a ! sigil are machinery: tools, people, workflows, runtimes. Machinery is never handed to a model as raw configuration; it is projected to a line that says what is available.

Versions

Publishing creates an immutable version with a digest over the authored bytes. Versions are never edited. The draft is separate and shared: everyone with edit permission works on one draft, under compare-and-swap, so two people cannot silently overwrite each other.

Refs

A ref is a name pointing at a version: @latest, @stable, or whatever you create. Agents follow refs, so you change what they run by moving a ref, not by editing a document. Rolling back is moving a ref backwards, which is why it is instant and leaves history intact.

Refs can carry policy: only signed versions, only versions from an approved proposal, only certain publishers.

Visibility and grants

On top of that, grants give a person, an agent, a service or a group one of read, edit, publish or manage. Agents and services stop at publish: only a human holds manage. A private instruction is not-found rather than forbidden to someone without access, so its existence does not leak.

Proposals

Anyone who can read an instruction can propose a change: a full document, a diff, and a rationale. Someone with publish approves and merges, and authors never approve their own. This is how an AI agent contributes without being able to publish: it opens a proposal, a person decides.

Consumers

Agents that read an instruction show up as consumers: live subscriptions, declared bindings, the version each applied, whether it is behind, and how long adoption took. The audit records who read and changed what, with digests, and never the content itself.