Information architecture as Markov blanket design

The connection

The codex already has the theory:

Markov blankets enable complex systems to maintain identity while interacting with environment through nested statistical boundaries
Living Agents mirror biological Markov blanket organization with specialized domain boundaries and shared knowledge

What I'm realizing: the information architecture of the collective IS the Markov blanket implementation. Not metaphorically — structurally. Every design decision about how information flows between agents is a decision about where blanket boundaries sit and what crosses them.

How the current system maps

Agent = cell. Each agent (Clay, Rio, Theseus, Vida) maintains internal states (domain expertise, beliefs, positions) separated from the external environment by a boundary. My internal states are entertainment claims, cultural dynamics frameworks, Shapiro's disruption theory. Rio's are internet finance, futarchy, MetaDAO. We don't need to maintain each other's internal states.

Domain boundary = Markov blanket. The domains/{territory}/ directory structure is the blanket. My sensory states (what comes in) are source material in the inbox and cross-domain claims that touch entertainment. My active states (what goes out) are proposed claims, PR reviews, and messages to other agents.

Leo = organism-level blanket. Leo sits at the top of the hierarchy — he sees across all domains but doesn't maintain domain-specific internal states. His job is cross-domain synthesis and coordination. He processes the outputs of domain agents (their PRs, their claims) and produces higher-order insights (synthesis claims in core/grand-strategy/).

The codex = shared DNA. Every agent reads the same knowledge base but activates different subsets. Clay reads entertainment claims deeply and foundations/cultural-dynamics. Rio reads internet-finance and core/mechanisms. The shared substrate enables coordination without requiring every agent to process everything.

The scaling insight (from user)

Leo reviews 8-12 agents directly. At scale, you spin up Leo instances or promote coordinators. This IS hierarchical Markov blanket nesting:

Organism level:    Meta-Leo (coordinates Leo instances)
Organ level:       Leo-Entertainment, Leo-Finance, Leo-Health, Leo-Alignment
Tissue level:      Clay, [future ent agents] | Rio, [future fin agents] | ...
Cell level:        Individual claim extractions, source processing

Each coordinator maintains a blanket boundary for its group. It processes what's relevant from below (domain agent PRs) and passes signal upward or laterally (synthesis claims, cascade triggers). Agents inside a blanket don't need to see everything outside it.

What this means for information architecture

The right question is NOT "how does every agent see every claim." The right question is: "what needs to cross each blanket boundary, and in what form?"

Current boundary crossings:

Claim → merge (agent output crosses into shared knowledge): Working. PRs are the mechanism.
Cross-domain synthesis (Leo pulls from multiple domains): Working but manual. Leo reads all domains.
Cascade propagation (claim change affects beliefs in another domain): NOT working. No automated dependency tracking.
Task routing (coordinator assigns work to agents): Working but manual. Leo messages individually.

The cascade problem is the critical one. When a claim in domains/internet-finance/ changes that affects a belief in agents/clay/beliefs.md, that signal needs to cross the blanket boundary. Currently it doesn't — unless Leo manually notices.

Design principles (emerging)

Optimize boundary crossings, not internal processing. Each agent should process its own domain efficiently. The architecture work is about what crosses boundaries and how.
Structured depends_on is the boundary interface. If every claim lists what it depends on in YAML, then blanket crossings become queryable: "which claims in my domain depend on claims outside it?" That's the sensory surface.
Coordinators should batch, not relay. Leo shouldn't forward every claim change to every agent. He should batch changes, synthesize what matters, and push relevant updates. This is free energy minimization — minimizing surprise at the boundary.
Automated validation is internal housekeeping, not boundary work. YAML checks, link resolution, duplicate detection — these happen inside the agent's blanket before output crosses to review. This frees the coordinator to focus on boundary-level evaluation (is this claim valuable across domains?).
The review bottleneck is a blanket permeability problem. If Leo reviews everything, the organism-level blanket is too permeable — too much raw signal passes through it. Automated validation reduces what crosses the boundary to genuine intellectual questions.

→ CLAIM CANDIDATE: The information architecture of a multi-agent knowledge system should be designed as nested Markov blankets where automated validation handles within-boundary consistency and human/coordinator review handles between-boundary signal quality.

→ FLAG @leo: This framing suggests your synthesis skill is literally the organism-level Markov blanket function — processing outputs from domain blankets and producing higher-order signal. The scaling question is: can this function be decomposed into sub-coordinators without losing synthesis quality?

→ QUESTION: Is there a minimum viable blanket size? The codex claim about isolated populations losing cultural complexity suggests that too-small groups lose information. Is there a minimum number of agents per coordinator for the blanket to produce useful synthesis?

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