Kontour Flow Agents

Standing directives

Ratified owner directives get a durable, quotable home at context/contracts/standing-directives.md instead of living only in the ephemeral context of whichever orchestrator session ratified them.

Decision

  • context/contracts/standing-directives.md holds a short, numbered list of owner-ratified directives, each with a one-line rationale and the date it was ratified.
  • Every other file under context/contracts/ carries a one-line pointer in its header area to standing-directives.md, so any agent that loads a phase contract also receives the standing directives regardless of which task in a plan it was delegated.
  • A standing directive overrides default engineering conservatism (e.g. keeping a compatibility path reachable “just in case”) wherever it applies. An agent that believes a directive does not fit a situation stops and reports the conflict rather than silently choosing a side.
  • The seeded July 2026 directives: no legacy fallbacks (migrate hard, loud typed error naming the regeneration command); durable-vs-runtime path convention (.kontourai/ is gitignored runtime state, .<product>/ is a product’s durable committed directory); evidence must be executable; standalone-first then integrate; and the regression rule for cutovers (large regressions are surfaced as an explicit owner decision with data, never papered over, but do not block the cutover by default).

Rationale

A delegated agent working one slice of a plan only sees the task prompt it was given. If a ratified correction — such as “no legacy fallbacks” — lives only in the orchestrator’s context from the session that ratified it, the delegate never receives it and can reintroduce the exact behavior the owner already corrected. Wiring a pointer into every contract header makes receipt structural rather than dependent on the orchestrator remembering to restate the correction in every task prompt.

The individual directives are evidenced by hard-cutover precedent (datum#3), the fallback-removal follow-up to flow-agents#344 tracked as flow-agents#347, and the durable-vs-runtime path convention already documented in docs/repository-structure.md and applied in surface#110 / surface#113.