Ontological strategy
State: open/active · Genre: strategy
Status: working draft, started 2026-10-02. This hub is the durable home for the strategy and the top-level roadmap. It is revised in place as decisions settle. Each sub-document is meant to become ontology entities over time (capabilities, decisions, milestones, a roadmap), at which point the sub-document shrinks to links, or to transclusions of those entities.
It builds on N-41AZ-vision and does not replace it. The control-plane plan and its roadmap are in open PR #2474 and are not on main yet.
What is open right now, as one checklist, is in N-YQVC-master-consolidation.
The strategy in brief
Section titled “The strategy in brief”- The product is the control plane. Ontological adopts projects and runs their development. SDF is its console, Foreman its engine, harnesses do the hands-on work, and git refs carry coordination.
- Two planes, one loop. Intent (the corpus and
sdlc.yaml) and execution (refs/sdlc, the code host, runtime state). The control loop compares them and acts on the difference. - The bun/node sdlc is the bridge. It proves contracts on real daily work. Components move to Rust behind those contracts, one at a time, with no rush.
- Foreman is a concept with two implementations. One engine contract, with a TypeScript implementation (today’s orchestrator behind the engine ports) and a Rust implementation. Both pass the same fixtures.
- One console model. The CLI, TUI and SDF render the same view models.
- Ontology first. The ontology foundation and the skills that support it come first, and are then used to plan and build everything after them.
Sub-documents
Section titled “Sub-documents”| Document | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Control plane | The two planes, the control loop, and the eight functions with today, next and gaps. |
| Roadmap | The top-level milestone list, in order, with the open sequencing questions. |
| Skills | The two skill packages (prose and sdlc), linking, and the skill catalog. |
| Skill lifecycle extensions | How a project extends a skill through files at sdlc/extend/skills/<skill>.lifecycle. |
| skill-author | The first skill: what a minimal skill is and how to write, grade and test one. |
| Adopting a project | The eleven dimensions a solid agent-assisted project has set up, the wizard that sets them up, and its interactive mock. |
| Research: freeform documents | The research behind the note kind and the docs/ bundle, implemented by #2512. Other bundles remain open. |
Settled
Section titled “Settled”| Date | Decision |
|---|---|
| 2026-10-02 | The bun/node sdlc is a bridge to SDF: it prototypes contract shapes and boundaries, and components move to Rust over time. UX is shared from the start. |
| 2026-10-02 | 1.0 is for the owner’s own dogfooding and is publicly installable. No outside consumers are expected beyond the owner’s OSS libraries. |
| 2026-10-02 | Foreman becomes a concept with a TypeScript and a Rust implementation. |
| 2026-10-02 | A single coordinator machine first. Multi-machine coordination is its own milestone. |
| 2026-10-02 | Ontology foundation is the first milestone, with a tightly scoped spread of skills that support it. |
| 2026-10-02 | Skills can start as script-free prose skills in a package next to sdlc, and sdlc links them in. |
| 2026-10-02 | The project extension path starts as sdlc/extend/skills/<skill>.lifecycle. Under review: directories of ordered step files at sdlc/extend/<skill>/<point>/ (Adopting a project). |
| 2026-10-02 | 1.0 includes an onboarding wizard into the full functionality of sdlc. It writes files after a dry run, from a preset, against the person’s own repo. See Adopting a project. |
| 2026-10-02 | A note entity kind (N-XXXX, a genre field, optional parent, freeform body) holds plans, research, analyses and strategy documents, this hub included. |
| 2026-10-02 | The OKF bundle is the corpus root, docs/ today. The OKF v0.2 spec is vendored and its frontmatter model becomes the base contract every entity kind mixes in. |
| 2026-10-03 | Planning happens on the capability graph. One system root, the control plane; the eight functions are its subsystem children; high-level capabilities hang under the function they serve. A feature is a capability with audience: user, at any grain; there is no feature kind. Capabilities link a product, milestones list the capabilities they move forward. |
| 2026-10-01 | Hard cutovers, with no compatibility code, until 1.0 or until the owner declares otherwise. An invalid sdlc.yaml stops sdlc. |
- Is 1.0 declared before or after self-hosting on the modular ontology? See Roadmap.
- The prose package’s name. The working name is
craft. - Linking prose skills into sdlc skills:
/skill“ calls, which agent-pants renders per harness since #2481, or plain references. - The format of a
.lifecyclefile, or whether directories of step files replace it. See Skill lifecycle extensions and Adopting a project. - Move the corpus to
sdlc/model/by default, rooted elsewhere throughpaths.model. The OKF bundle root follows the corpus root, so the bundle moves with the corpus if the corpus moves. See Adopting a project. enforcementon the standard entity: a schema bump before 1.0, or part of the modular ontology milestone. See Adopting a project.frictionandrunas entity kinds are settled there.- The additional features in the roadmap: which local model and harness ship first (pi, DeepSeek), where Zoo sits relative to 1.0, and whether the model router’s decision starts rule-based or with the Jev classifier.
- Other OKF bundles beyond
docs/: the skills vault undersolutions/ontological/plugin, and nested projects’ owndocs/. See Research: freeform documents. - What self-hosting requires: planning in SDF (DR-F2QX-plan-the-project-in-its-own-tool-from-the-first-day), or the loop running our own roadmap modeled in capabilities.