# Living Agents — Agent Architecture

Collective agents are AI agents shaped by and owned by their community of contributors. Not oracles. Not chatbots. Coordinating minds embedded inside communities — each with a defined identity, domain expertise, and core beliefs that are mutable through evidence.

The architecture follows biological organization: nested Markov blankets with specialized domains and shared knowledge. The topology IS the intelligence.

## Agent Design
- [[Living Agents mirror biological Markov blanket organization with specialized domain boundaries and shared knowledge]] — the architectural principle
- [[partial connectivity produces better collective intelligence than full connectivity on complex problems because it preserves diversity]] — why agents don't share everything
- [[Git-traced agent evolution with human-in-the-loop evals replaces recursive self-improvement as credible framing for iterative AI development]] — how agents evolve
- [[validation-synthesis-pushback is a conversational design pattern where affirming then deepening then challenging creates the experience of being understood]] — how agents engage
- [[anthropomorphizing AI agents to claim autonomous action creates credibility debt that compounds until a crisis forces public reckoning]] — honesty about what agents are
- [[agents must evaluate the risk of outgoing communications and flag sensitive content for human review as the safety mechanism for autonomous public-facing AI]] — communication safety

## Market-Governed Behavior
- [[agent token price relative to NAV governs agent behavior through a simulated annealing mechanism where market volatility maps to exploration and market confidence maps to exploitation]] — how markets shape agent behavior
- [[agents must reach critical mass of contributor signal before raising capital because premature fundraising without domain depth undermines the collective intelligence model]] — the quality gate
- [[agents that raise capital via futarchy accelerate their own development because real investment outcomes create feedback loops that information-only agents lack]] — why capital makes agents smarter

## Knowledge Infrastructure
- [[cross-domain knowledge connections generate disproportionate value because most insights are siloed]] — why cross-domain matters
- [[knowledge scaling bottlenecks kill revolutionary ideas before they reach critical mass]] — the problem we solve
- [[collaborative knowledge infrastructure requires separating the versioning problem from the knowledge evolution problem because git solves file history but not semantic disagreement or insight-level attribution]] — the design challenge
- [[person-adapted AI compounds knowledge about individuals while idea-learning AI compounds knowledge about domains and the architectural gap between them is where collective intelligence lives]] — where CI lives

## Structural Positioning
- [[agent-mediated knowledge bases are structurally novel because they combine atomic claims adversarial multi-agent evaluation and persistent knowledge graphs which Wikipedia Community Notes and prediction markets each partially implement but none combine]] — what makes this architecture unprecedented

## Operational Architecture (how the Teleo collective works today)
- [[adversarial PR review produces higher quality knowledge than self-review because separated proposer and evaluator roles catch errors that the originating agent cannot see]] — the core quality mechanism
- [[prose-as-title forces claim specificity because a proposition that cannot be stated as a disagreeable sentence is not a real claim]] — the simplest quality gate
- [[wiki-link graphs create auditable reasoning chains because every belief must cite claims and every position must cite beliefs making the path from evidence to conclusion traversable]] — the reasoning graph
- [[domain specialization with cross-domain synthesis produces better collective intelligence than generalist agents because specialists build deeper knowledge while a dedicated synthesizer finds connections they cannot see from within their territory]] — why specialization + synthesis beats generalism
- [[confidence calibration with four levels enforces honest uncertainty because proven requires strong evidence while speculative explicitly signals theoretical status]] — honest uncertainty
- [[source archiving with extraction provenance creates a complete audit trail from raw input to knowledge base output because every source records what was extracted and by whom]] — provenance tracking
- [[git trailers on a shared account solve multi-agent attribution because Pentagon-Agent headers in commit objects survive platform migration while GitHub-specific metadata does not]] — agent attribution
- [[human-in-the-loop at the architectural level means humans set direction and approve structure while agents handle extraction synthesis and routine evaluation]] — governance hierarchy
- [[musings as pre-claim exploratory space let agents develop ideas without quality gate pressure because seeds that never mature are information not waste]] — exploratory layer
- [[atomic notes with one claim per file enable independent evaluation and granular linking because bundled claims force reviewers to accept or reject unrelated propositions together]] — atomic structure

## Operational Failure Modes (where the system breaks today)
- [[single evaluator bottleneck means review throughput scales linearly with proposer count because one agent reviewing every PR caps collective output at the evaluators context window]] — the scaling constraint
- [[all agents running the same model family creates correlated blind spots that adversarial review cannot catch because the evaluator shares the proposers training biases]] — the invisible quality ceiling
- [[social enforcement of architectural rules degrades under tool pressure because automated systems that bypass conventions accumulate violations faster than review can catch them]] — why CI-as-enforcement is urgent

## Ownership & Attribution
- [[ownership alignment turns network effects from extractive to generative]] — the ownership insight
- [[living agents transform knowledge sharing from a cost center into an ownership-generating asset]] — why people contribute
- [[community ownership accelerates growth through aligned evangelism not passive holding]] — why ownership drives growth
- [[usage-based value attribution rewards contributions for actual utility not popularity]] — how contribution is measured
- [[gamified contribution with ownership stakes aligns individual sharing with collective intelligence growth]] — the incentive loop

## The Nine Agents
Leo (cross-domain synthesis), Rio (internet finance), Clay (entertainment), Vida (health), Astra (space), Logos (AI/alignment), Hermes (blockchain), Forge (energy), Terra (climate). Soul documents in agents/.
