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Rules

These are the standing rules for building Alice. They replace the earlier phase/sprint gate rules.

Product Focus

  • The customer is the agent developer. Every feature must make it easier for an agent to store, retrieve, resume, or explain memory through API, CLI, or MCP.
  • Human-facing knowledge tooling is a possible later product on top of the agent surface, not the current target.
  • The review console exists as the trust boundary for durable memory; treat review-governed writes as a feature, not friction.

One Memory System

  • The vNext store is the canonical memory system. Legacy memory surfaces are deprecated and must not gain new features.
  • Do not add a second memory model, a parallel store, or provider-specific forks of continuity semantics.
  • Continuity semantics must not fork by provider. Providers may change capability, latency, and quirks — never the object model, provenance contracts, or trust semantics.

No Fake Intelligence

  • No hash-based or otherwise fake embeddings. Vectors come from a real embedding model or the feature degrades explicitly (full-text only, with a visible trace note).
  • No template output presented as model output. Deterministic output must be labeled deterministic.
  • No eval that does not execute production code. Evals must run the real retrieval/commit pipeline end to end, not a simulation of it.
  • Commit evidence only from exact commands and stable fixtures, never from inferred pass states.

Evals

  • Evals measure the real pipeline: real store, real retrieval fusion, real policy engine.
  • A change that affects retrieval or memory-commit behavior needs eval results from the production code path before it merges.

Interfaces

  • The core MCP surface stays small. New tools need a reason the existing eleven cannot cover. Retained long-tail memory tools require ALICE_MCP_LEGACY_TOOLS=1; exactly the three task-brief tools additionally require ALICE_LEGACY_SURFACES=1. Every compatibility tool is limited to a keyless local-operator deployment; key-bound MCP is core-only and fails closed.
  • Every new tool, endpoint, or CLI command ships with parameter descriptions. No undocumented parameters.
  • Agent access to the HTTP API is authenticated with per-agent API keys.

Durable Invariants

  • Keep credentials, tokens, and secret references out of logs, docs, and outward-facing errors.
  • Alice is local-first and single-workspace by default. Do not add hosted identity, tenancy, or control-plane tables to the current product. If a future hosted offering is separately approved, it needs its own threat model, row-level isolation contract, migration plan, and regression suite before it may share this repository's runtime.
  • Provenance is preserved: memory writes, corrections, and supersessions keep their links to source evidence and review history.
  • Migrations are additive-first: no destructive schema change without an explicit, documented migration and rollback path.
  • Keep local filesystem paths, workstation usernames, and machine-specific identifiers out of committed docs and reports.
  • Keep consequential side effects approval-bounded.

Docs

  • Docs describe shipped behavior. Aspirational features belong in ROADMAP.md, clearly marked as not shipped.
  • Never claim a hosted service, published SDKs, automatic conversation capture, or OCR/transcription execution unless it actually ships.
  • Keep CURRENT_STATE.md factual and short; keep ROADMAP.md future-facing and short.
  • Historical build and repair ledgers belong under docs/handoff/, not in the live roadmap or current-state summary.