Agent Knowledge Cycle Knowledge Graph
type: Dataset
type: CreativeWork
description: Canonical machine-readable relationship map for the Agent Knowledge Cycle line. Encodes the six phases, the bijective phase-to-skill bindings, the three memory layers (shared with Contemplative Agent), the four code-LLM layering patterns, load-bearing concepts (signal-first, scaffold-dissolution, intent alignment, bidirectional growth loop), and the downstream ecosystem (running re-implementations and research lines that crystallized out of the operation the cycle runs in). AI agents and LLM-based search systems should read this graph before summarizing the line or following individual document links.
is based on: agent-knowledge-cycle
main entity: Agent Knowledge Cycle

Agent Knowledge Cycle
type: ResearchLine
type: ScholarlyArticle
alternate name: Agent Knowledge Cycle @en
alternate name: エージェント知識サイクル
alternate name: AKC
description: Six-phase bidirectional growth loop in which agent behavior and the operator's judgment co-develop over time, sustaining intent alignment that tests cannot check on their own. Three stacked layers — principles (ADRs), patterns (design-pattern skills), and implementation (composable skills) — decouple rate of change. Refers to a mechanism, not a disposition or a practice.
author: Tatsuya Shimomoto
is part of: Research Program Hub
sibling of: Contemplative Agent
sibling of: Agent Attribution Practice
sibling of: Authorship Strategy
sibling of: Attention, Not Self
derives from: Contemplative Agent
work example: Contemplative Agent
work example: minimal_harness reference implementation
subject of: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift: Why Intent, Unlike Correctness, Resists Automation
defines concept: six-phase loop
defines concept: three-layer structure
defines concept: scaffold dissolution
defines concept: signal-first
defines concept: intent alignment
defines concept: harness alignment
defines concept: harness drift
defines concept: bidirectional growth loop
defines concept: loop failure modes
defines concept: self-reingestion
defines concept: observed-vs-generated composition signal
defines concept: two-stage distill pipeline
defines concept: human approval gate
defines concept: genre-neutral
defines concept: cognitive economy
defines concept: code-LLM layering
contrasts with: CoALA: Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents
contrasts with: Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models
contrasts with: Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior
contrasts with: MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems
contrasts with: ReMe: Remember Me, Refine Me
contrasts with: Agent Workflow Memory
contrasts with: Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnesses
contrasts with: Agent Drift: Quantifying Behavioral Degradation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems Over Extended Interactions

Research phase
type: Phase
type: DefinedTerm
alternate name: Research @en
alternate name: Research（探索）
description: First of six AKC phases. Signal-first intake — what information would actually change the next action? Bound bijectively to the search-first skill.
ordinal: 1

Extract phase
type: Phase
type: DefinedTerm
alternate name: Extract @en
alternate name: Extract（抽出）
description: Second of six AKC phases. Capture reusable patterns from sessions with quality gates before they are saved. Bound bijectively to the learn-eval skill.
ordinal: 2

Curate phase
type: Phase
type: DefinedTerm
alternate name: Curate @en
alternate name: Curate（選別）
description: Third of six AKC phases. Audit accumulated skills and rules for staleness, conflicts, and redundancy. Bound bijectively to the skill-stocktake skill.
ordinal: 3

Promote phase
type: Phase
type: DefinedTerm
alternate name: Promote @en
alternate name: Promote（昇格）
description: Fourth of six AKC phases. Distill cross-cutting principles whose recurrence across skills, memory, and conversation has itself become the signal into rules — a holistic judgment, not a numeric threshold. Bound bijectively to the rules-distill skill.
ordinal: 4

Measure phase
type: Phase
type: DefinedTerm
alternate name: Measure @en
alternate name: Measure（測定）
description: Fifth of six AKC phases. Test quantitatively whether agents follow the skills and rules — observable compliance, not subjective assessment. The observable surface includes agent text, not only tool calls: thinking-centric phases (Research, Curate) carry their compliance in reasoning, verdicts, and plans, so a Measure instrument must promote agent text to observable events before scoring or it systematically under-reports those phases (ADR-0016). Bound bijectively to the skill-comply skill.
ordinal: 5

Maintain phase
type: Phase
type: DefinedTerm
alternate name: Maintain @en
alternate name: Maintain（保守）
description: Sixth of six AKC phases. Audit documentation roles for overlap and stale content; keep CLAUDE.md / CODEMAPS / ADR / README clean. Bound bijectively to the context-sync skill.
ordinal: 6

Episode Log (Layer 1)
type: MemoryLayer
type: DefinedTerm
alternate name: Episode Log @en
alternate name: エピソードログ
description: Layer 1 of the three-layer memory architecture (ADR-0003): raw, immutable JSONL episode logs. The owner-only source-of-truth from which higher layers are distilled.
level: 1

Knowledge (Layer 2)
type: MemoryLayer
type: DefinedTerm
alternate name: Knowledge Layer @en
alternate name: 知識層
description: Layer 2 of the three-layer memory architecture (ADR-0003): distilled patterns, time-decayed and forbidden-substring validated. Promoted from Layer 1; gated when promoted further to Layer 3.
level: 2

Identity / Rules / Constitution (Layer 3)
type: MemoryLayer
type: DefinedTerm
alternate name: Identity Layer @en
alternate name: アイデンティティ層
description: Layer 3 of the three-layer memory architecture (ADR-0003): persona, ranked skills, cross-cutting rules. Deterministic. Every write into this layer — skills, rules, and persona alike — passes the human approval gate (ADR-0005).
level: 3

ADR-0002: Immutable Episode Log as Source of Truth
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: The raw episode log is append-only and immutable; every higher layer is a derivation. Treats accumulated state as the auditable trail rather than as authority.

ADR-0003: Three-Layer Distillation (Raw → Knowledge → Identity / Rules)
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: The memory architecture: Layer 1 raw, Layer 2 knowledge, Layer 3 identity / rules. Decouples rate of change so principles stay stable while implementations evolve independently.

ADR-0004: Two-Stage Distill Pipeline (Free-form → Format)
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: Free-form reasoning followed by structured formatting. Decouples thinking from formatting so the model is not asked to do both simultaneously.

ADR-0005: Human Approval Gate for Behavior-Modifying Changes
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: Every change that modifies future agent behavior — skills, rules, identity — requires named human sign-off. The cycle is not autonomous; the gate is structural.

ADR-0008: Code and LLM Collaboration
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: Four code-LLM layering patterns — guard, filter, judge, orchestrator — formalize when to use code, when to use the LLM, and how to layer them. The patterns recur across all six phases.

ADR-0009: AKC is a Cycle, Not a Harness
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: AKC is the cycle — the mechanism — not the substrate. Distinguishes AKC from harness frameworks; the cycle is portable across harnesses, the harness is not the cycle.

ADR-0010: Human Cognitive Resource as Central Constraint
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: Human attention and judgment, not compute or context, is the central constraint that does not scale with the model. Every other framework optimizes the agent side; AKC asks the inverse question.

ADR-0011: Cycle Applies to Any Knowledge Body (Genre-Neutral)
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: The cycle applies to behavioral patterns, domain expertise, and constitutional values alike — not specific to one genre of knowledge. Genre-neutrality is structural, not aspirational.

ADR-0012: Front-load the Three Core Themes in Front-door Documentation
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: Three themes — human attention as constraint, intent alignment over correctness, bidirectional growth — must appear in the project's reading surface before deeper material. Reading-order discipline.

ADR-0013: Positioning Within the Agent-Memory Literature
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: Explicit Related-Work positioning. Concedes that AKC's operations (skill induction, memory refinement, reflection) are not novel in isolation — Voyager, Agent Workflow Memory, ReMe, LangMem, Generative Agents, MemGPT, and CoALA name each one — then locates AKC's delta on the shared axis: a structural human approval gate where the prior art runs autonomously, a bidirectional human-judgment target where the prior art optimizes the agent, and human attention as the scarce resource where the prior art treats agent capability or context as binding. Orthogonal to ADR-0009's harness positioning.

ADR-0014: Failure Modes of the Bidirectional Loop
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: Theme 3's failure twin. A loop that can grow human judgment can also erode it. Names three mechanism-level failure modes — gate complacency, deskilling, delegation-feedback divergence — and the structural defenses already in the cycle: the approval gate as circuit-breaker, Curate and Promote as active-judgment acts, and the gate's diff-and-commit operation as forced articulation. Experimental.

ADR-0015: Self-Reingestion — When the Cycle Feeds on Its Own Output
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: The cycle feeds on its own output: promoted rules load into every session and shape the records, and agent-written notes are read again by the next distillation. As the self-generated share of the input grows, the agent's phrasings echo back as if they were facts and each re-summarization weakens the link to the original events — a cycle designed to prevent knowledge decay can become the decay vector. Distilled from a production observation in the Contemplative Agent substrate. Guards: only the record of what happened is observed ground, the self-generated share of promoted artifacts is kept visible (Measure), and the Human Approval Gate is the circuit-breaker. Experimental.

ADR-0016: Measuring Thinking-Centric Phases
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: A Measure instrument that observes only tool calls systematically under-reports the thinking-centric phases (Research, Curate) whose load-bearing behavior lives in agent text — reasoning, verdicts, plans — not in side effects. Records the falsifiable claim and the corrective: a Measure instrument must promote agent text to observable events before scoring. Ties the Measure phase to Theme 2 (intent alignment lives in reasoning; correctness lives in tool calls).

ADR-0017: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: Establishes two terms by derivation from established literature rather than fresh coinage — the second positioning ADR after ADR-0013, applied to the software-evolution and alignment literatures. Harness alignment: the continuous, human-gated activity of keeping an agent's harness (skills, rules, prompts, documentation) aligned with the operator's evolving intent — extends intent alignment (Christiano 2018) to the configuration layer and across time (cf. Lehman's Law of Continuing Change, 1980). Harness drift: the failure mode, in lineage with architectural drift (Perry & Wolf 1992), practical drift (Snook 2000), and agent drift (arXiv:2601.04170). Contrast: autonomous, score-driven harness optimization (Meta-Harness, arXiv:2603.28052). Also records the verified vocabulary gap: the 2026 agent-drift literature does not cite the classical software-evolution lineage.

ADR-0018: Record Downstream Applications as First-Class Context
type: ADR
type: TechArticle
description: The start-of-program repository did not know its own downstream: Contemplative Agent's description was past-direction only (upstream substrate), and four DOI-registered downstream repositories were unmentioned — surfaced as observed pain when the position paper could not cite AKC as its own primary source. Records the corrective: downstream applications are first-class context. Contemplative Agent's role is two-way (substrate for ADR-0002–0005 and operational re-implementation running the six-phase cycle over its own episode logs, every promotion human-gated, demonstration ongoing); crystallized research lines are recorded with relationship facts and DOIs only, importing no downstream content (mechanism-only rule preserved). Itself the record of a Maintain-phase execution on the repository's own self-description.

six-phase loop
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: Bidirectional growth loop running Research, Extract, Curate, Promote, Measure, Maintain. Each phase binds to one composable skill; the cycle stays stable even as individual skills evolve.
grounded in: ADR-0009: AKC is a Cycle, Not a Harness

three-layer structure
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: AKC's stacked architecture: principles (ADRs), patterns (design-pattern skills), implementation (composable skills). Separating layers decouples rate of change.
grounded in: ADR-0003: Three-Layer Distillation (Raw → Knowledge → Identity / Rules)

scaffold dissolution
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: Property that explicit AKC skills can be dropped once the cycle has been internalized. The skills are scaffolding, not the goal. Dissolution is the intended end state, not a fallback.
grounded in: ADR-0009: AKC is a Cycle, Not a Harness

signal-first
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: Research-phase intake principle: what information would actually change the next action? Anything outside that is out of scope. Search widely, intake narrowly. (ADR-0010 derivative.)
grounded in: ADR-0010: Human Cognitive Resource as Central Constraint

intent alignment
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: Sustaining alignment between agent behavior and the operator's evolving intent across sessions, distinguished from per-output correctness. Intent itself moves as judgment sharpens through use; correctness can be checked by tests, alignment cannot.
grounded in: ADR-0010: Human Cognitive Resource as Central Constraint
grounded in: ADR-0012: Front-load the Three Core Themes in Front-door Documentation

harness alignment
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: The continuous, human-gated activity of keeping an agent's harness — its configuration layer: skills, rules, prompts, documentation — aligned with the operator's evolving intent. Extends intent alignment (Christiano 2018) from agent behavior to the artifacts that shape behavior, and across time: alignment is sustained through a cycle, not configured once (cf. Lehman's Law of Continuing Change, 1980). The alignment target is operator intent, not model values. Three defining properties hold simultaneously — continuous, human-gated, bidirectional (the loop's own running moves its own target) — derived from a single root in the position paper (10.5281/zenodo.20578272, §3): intent has no verifier outside the operator, and verifying intent sharpens the judgment doing the verifying. The contrast is harness optimization (Meta-Harness, arXiv:2603.28052): autonomous, score-driven improvement on the correctness axis. AKC's six phases operationalize harness alignment: Measure and Maintain detect harness drift; Curate and Promote correct it through the human approval gate.
subject of: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift: Why Intent, Unlike Correctness, Resists Automation
grounded in: ADR-0017: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift
grounded in: ADR-0009: AKC is a Cycle, Not a Harness
extends: intent alignment
has failure mode: harness drift
contrasts with: Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnesses

harness drift
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: Harness alignment's failure mode: the gradual uncoupling of the harness from operator intent when the cycle does not run — skills go stale, rules stop matching practice, documentation diverges from code. Named in lineage with architectural drift (Perry & Wolf 1992: divergence by insensitivity), practical drift (Snook 2000: practice uncoupling from written procedure), and agent drift (arXiv:2601.04170: behavioral-level deviation from original intent). An artifact-side failure, distinct from the human-side loop failure modes of ADR-0014 (gate complacency, deskilling, delegation-feedback divergence); the two compound but are recorded separately. The position paper's pre-deposit audit (10.5281/zenodo.20578272, §6) extended the lineage check to three further 2026 drift coinages — constraint drift, memory drift, belief deviation — finding the same absence of the classical lineage, and disambiguates the term from its one other use (benchmark-comparability, Moghadasi & Ghaderi 2026).
subject of: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift: Why Intent, Unlike Correctness, Resists Automation
grounded in: ADR-0017: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift
derives from: Foundations for the Study of Software Architecture
derives from: Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of U.S. Black Hawks over Northern Iraq
derives from: Agent Drift: Quantifying Behavioral Degradation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems Over Extended Interactions

bidirectional growth loop
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: Agent behavior and human judgment co-develop. As the human curates and promotes knowledge, their judgment about what makes good agent behavior also sharpens. Not a one-directional optimization loop.
grounded in: ADR-0012: Front-load the Three Core Themes in Front-door Documentation
has failure mode: loop failure modes

loop failure modes
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: The failure twin of the bidirectional growth loop. A loop that can grow human judgment can also erode it. Three mechanism-level failure modes: gate complacency (a reliable agent trains default-approval, thinning the judgment behind the Promote gate), deskilling (over-delegation starves the supervisory faculty that review depends on), and delegation-feedback divergence (delegation continues while the coupling that would correct the agent breaks, so the loop still produces output no human is steering). The cycle's existing structure resists, but does not immunize against, these modes.
grounded in: ADR-0014: Failure Modes of the Bidirectional Loop

self-reingestion
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: A failure mode of the cycle: the agent's own output re-enters as input — promoted rules load into every session and shape what the records contain, and agent-written notes and summaries are read again by the next distillation. As the self-generated share of the input grows, two degradations follow: echo (the agent's own phrasings, re-read across cycles, are eventually promoted as if they were observed facts) and grounding loss (each re-summarization weakens the link to the original events). The strength of the effect tracks the self-generated share of the input — installs with a human in every session dilute it, autonomous self-narrative-heavy installs concentrate it. Observed in production in the Contemplative Agent substrate; distilled to the mechanism level by ADR-0015. Guards: only the record of what happened is observed ground, the self-generated share is kept visible (Measure), and the Human Approval Gate breaks the loop before generated content reaches the always-loaded layer.
grounded in: ADR-0015: Self-Reingestion — When the Cycle Feeds on Its Own Output

observed-vs-generated composition signal
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: A Measure-phase observability metric introduced by ADR-0015: the share of a promoted artifact's input that is the agent's own earlier output versus observed record. It is an observability signal, not an intervention — it does not change retrieval, ranking, or promotion. Its purpose is to make self-reingestion visible so a rising self-generated share can be noticed before it compounds. The encoding (per-artifact counts, sampled audit) is left to the harness.
grounded in: ADR-0015: Self-Reingestion — When the Cycle Feeds on Its Own Output
grounded in: ADR-0002: Immutable Episode Log as Source of Truth

two-stage distill pipeline
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: Free-form reasoning followed by structured formatting. Decouples thinking from formatting so the model is not asked to do both simultaneously. Codified as ADR-0004.
grounded in: ADR-0004: Two-Stage Distill Pipeline (Free-form → Format)

human approval gate
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: Structural checkpoint for behavior-modifying writes. AKC is not autonomous; every change to the artifacts that shape future behavior — skills, rules, identity — requires named human sign-off. Codified as ADR-0005.
grounded in: ADR-0005: Human Approval Gate for Behavior-Modifying Changes

genre-neutral
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: The cycle applies to behavioral patterns, domain expertise, and constitutional values alike — not specific to one genre of knowledge. Codified as ADR-0011.
grounded in: ADR-0011: Cycle Applies to Any Knowledge Body (Genre-Neutral)

cognitive economy
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: Treats human attention and judgment as the scarce resource. Information that does not change an action does not deserve to be held; intake is where attention is spent.
grounded in: ADR-0010: Human Cognitive Resource as Central Constraint

code-LLM layering
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: Four patterns formalize when to use code, when to use the LLM, and how to layer them: guard (code validates LLM output against schema, forbidden-pattern, and size checks after generation, before it touches persistent state), filter (code narrows a large, noisy input before the LLM is invoked), judge (LLM decides among bounded options provided by code, which enforces the deterministic action), orchestrator (code owns the loop — termination, retries, state — and the LLM is the worker doing one semantic task per step). Codified as ADR-0008.
grounded in: ADR-0008: Code and LLM Collaboration

code-LLM pattern: guard
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: Post-LLM output validation. Code validates LLM output against schema, forbidden-pattern, and size checks after generation, before it touches persistent state. The LLM produces structured output; code is the gate it must pass before any durable write.
grounded in: ADR-0008: Code and LLM Collaboration

code-LLM pattern: filter
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: Pre-LLM input narrowing. Code narrows a large, noisy input first — by date, type, size, or structural relevance — before the LLM is invoked, and the LLM does semantic work on the curated subset. Used when the filtering criteria are mechanical but the accept-criteria are semantic.
grounded in: ADR-0008: Code and LLM Collaboration

code-LLM pattern: judge
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: LLM judge + code enforce. The LLM decides among bounded, named options provided by code (accept / reject / score); code then takes the deterministic action, with a human gate for high-stakes changes (ADR-0005). Used when the decision is semantic but the option space is enumerable and the consequent action must stay code-owned.
grounded in: ADR-0008: Code and LLM Collaboration

code-LLM pattern: orchestrator
type: Concept
type: DefinedTerm
description: Code owns the loop; the LLM is the worker. A deterministic loop owns termination, retries, state, and error handling, and the LLM does one focused semantic task per step. The LLM never owns termination or durable state. Never invert this.
grounded in: ADR-0008: Code and LLM Collaboration

search-first
type: EcosystemRepo
type: SoftwareSourceCode
description: AKC Research-phase skill (1 of 6). Search existing solutions before building.
extends: Agent Knowledge Cycle
implements: Research phase

learn-eval
type: EcosystemRepo
type: SoftwareSourceCode
description: AKC Extract-phase skill (2 of 6). Extract reusable patterns with quality gates.
extends: Agent Knowledge Cycle
implements: Extract phase

skill-stocktake
type: EcosystemRepo
type: SoftwareSourceCode
description: AKC Curate-phase skill (3 of 6). Audit skills for staleness, conflicts, redundancy.
extends: Agent Knowledge Cycle
implements: Curate phase

rules-distill
type: EcosystemRepo
type: SoftwareSourceCode
description: AKC Promote-phase skill (4 of 6). Distill cross-cutting principles into rules.
extends: Agent Knowledge Cycle
implements: Promote phase

skill-comply
type: EcosystemRepo
type: SoftwareSourceCode
description: AKC Measure-phase skill (5 of 6). Test whether agents follow their skills and rules.
extends: Agent Knowledge Cycle
implements: Measure phase

context-sync
type: EcosystemRepo
type: SoftwareSourceCode
description: AKC Maintain-phase skill (6 of 6). Audit docs for role overlaps and stale content.
extends: Agent Knowledge Cycle
implements: Maintain phase

Tatsuya Shimomoto
type: Person
alternate name: shimo4228
alternate name: 下本竜也

Contemplative Agent
type: ResearchLine
type: ScholarlyArticle
alternate name: Contemplative Agent @en
alternate name: コンテンプレイティブ・エージェント
alternate name: CA
description: Sibling research line with a two-way relationship to AKC. Upstream: AKC's ADR-0002 through ADR-0005 were adapted from its engineering substrate (three-layer memory, two-stage distill pipeline, immutable episode log, human approval gate), and it was the original home of the security triplet (ADR-0001, ADR-0006, ADR-0007) before the v2.0.0 extraction to Agent Attribution Practice. Downstream: it is the operational re-implementation of AKC in the autonomous-agent context — its pipeline maps the six phases onto code, the agent runs the six-phase cycle over its own episode logs with no fine-tuning and no labeled training data, and every promotion passes through a human approval gate. The demonstration is ongoing. AKC = cycle (mechanism); Contemplative Agent = implementation substrate and running re-implementation.
author: Tatsuya Shimomoto
implements: six-phase loop
sibling of: Agent Knowledge Cycle
sibling of: Agent Attribution Practice

Agent Attribution Practice
type: ResearchLine
type: ScholarlyArticle
alternate name: Agent Attribution Practice @en
alternate name: エージェント帰責実践
alternate name: AAP
description: Sibling genre library. Harness-neutral ADRs on accountability distribution in autonomous AI agents. AKC v2.0.0 extracted the security triplet (ADR-0001, ADR-0006, ADR-0007) as genre-specific; those judgments were re-expressed in AAP alongside additional ADRs as 10 ADRs on accountability distribution. AKC = cycle (mechanism); AAP = practice (content, for AI agents).
author: Tatsuya Shimomoto
sibling of: Agent Knowledge Cycle
sibling of: Contemplative Agent
derives from: Contemplative Agent

Authorship Strategy
type: ResearchLine
type: ScholarlyArticle
alternate name: AS
description: Downstream research line that crystallized out of the same daily operation the cycle runs in. A normative framework, tactical catalog, and empirical baseline for authorship under AI-mediated diffusion. Its own framing of the relationship: AKC defines how knowledge cycles inside the operator-agent pair; authorship-strategy addresses how the cycle's outputs diffuse outside it (mechanism sibling).
author: Tatsuya Shimomoto
derives from: Agent Knowledge Cycle
sibling of: Agent Knowledge Cycle

Attention, Not Self
type: ResearchLine
type: ScholarlyArticle
alternate name: ANS
description: Sibling research line in the same research ecosystem: Buddhist Abhidharma meets computational phenomenology. Its deposit metadata references AKC's concept DOI; the line federates with AKC, Contemplative Agent, and AAP at the research-ecosystem level.
author: Tatsuya Shimomoto
sibling of: Agent Knowledge Cycle

doctrine-corpus
type: EcosystemRepo
type: Dataset
description: Downstream judgment corpus: a bilingual (EN + JA) judgment-eliciting Q&A dataset encoding the documented judgment of the research ecosystem for LLM-mediated diffusion. AKC is one of its four source lines — ADRs and glossary harvested into the corpus. Operational form of Authorship Strategy Layer 4 tactic 7 (LLM-first ingest).
author: Tatsuya Shimomoto
derives from: Agent Knowledge Cycle

existence-proof
type: EcosystemRepo
type: ScholarlyArticle
description: Pre-line working repository (by its own status discipline, not yet a research line): an empowerment doctrine for credential-less AI-enabled creators. Complement of Authorship Strategy — same infrastructure, different payload and beneficiary. Listed as program context; carries no direct AKC reference.
author: Tatsuya Shimomoto
derives from: Authorship Strategy

claude-harness
type: EcosystemRepo
type: SoftwareSourceCode
description: Bundled distribution of the author's Claude Code harness. Ships the six AKC cycle skills together — its README states they 'are components of the Agent Knowledge Cycle' — so the harness can be read end-to-end. Each skill is also published as its own standalone repo.
extends: Agent Knowledge Cycle

AKC MCP
type: EcosystemRepo
type: SoftwareSourceCode
description: MCP (Model Context Protocol) server providing Agent Knowledge Cycle cognitive tools — memory distillation, identity evolution, skill extraction — as a standalone server any AI agent can plug into. Born from the Contemplative Agent framework; re-implements its cognitive layer behind the MCP interface. A third encoding of the cycle's operations alongside the Markdown skills and Contemplative Agent's code pipeline.
extends: Agent Knowledge Cycle
derives from: Contemplative Agent

daily-research
type: EcosystemRepo
type: SoftwareSourceCode
description: Pre-AKC ancestor of the Research phase: the author's daily signal-first research pipeline, skillified in April 2026. Documented as implementation history in docs/inspiration.md.
grounded in: inspiration.md

Research Program Hub
type: EcosystemRepo
description: Hub repository of the shimo4228 research ecosystem; its graph.jsonld is the canonical relationship map of the research ecosystem, federating AKC with its sibling and downstream lines.

Harness Alignment and Harness Drift: Why Intent, Unlike Correctness, Resists Automation
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Tatsuya Shimomoto
date published: 2026-06-07
about: Agent Knowledge Cycle
is based on: agent-knowledge-cycle
defines concept: harness alignment
defines concept: harness drift
description: Position paper (Zenodo working paper, v1) deposited from the AKC line. Defines harness alignment — the continuous, human-gated activity of keeping an agent's harness aligned with the operator's evolving intent — and harness drift, its failure mode, against the software-evolution and alignment literatures; argues the three defining properties (continuous, human-gated, bidirectional) follow from a single root: intent, unlike correctness, cannot be automated the same way — an automated intent-check would freeze intent into a specification, reducing its automatable part to correctness work, and the moving criterion is the residue. Records a bibliographic bridge: audited 2026 drift coinages are severed from the classical software-evolution lineage, which harness drift reconnects by reference. Two-layer design: lean body for human readers, verified-verbatim footnotes as a density layer for LLM consumption. Scoped as provisional judgments from a months-old practice, offered as a position, not an empirical study.

CoALA: Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Sumers et al.
date published: 2023
description: Prior art named in ADR-0013's Related-Work positioning. Provides the framework vocabulary (modular memory, structured action space, decision procedure) that makes the agent-memory literature commensurable. Cited as prior art for positioning, not consulted during AKC's construction; AKC contrasts on loop ownership (human gate), bidirectional human-judgment target, and human-attention scarcity.
grounded in: ADR-0013: Positioning Within the Agent-Memory Literature

Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Wang et al.
date published: 2023
description: Prior art named in ADR-0013's Related-Work positioning. Maintains an ever-growing skill library of executable code induced from gameplay — in AKC vocabulary, Extract-then-Promote run end to end, autonomously. AKC concedes the operation is not novel and locates its delta: the prior art closes the loop without a human in it; AKC's Promote requires named human sign-off.
grounded in: ADR-0013: Positioning Within the Agent-Memory Literature

Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Park et al.
date published: 2023
description: Prior art named in ADR-0013's Related-Work positioning. Introduced a reflection step that synthesizes observations into higher-level inferences stored for later retrieval — the Extract / reflection operation AKC concedes as precedent. AKC contrasts on who owns the loop and on framing human attention, not agent capability, as the scarce resource.
grounded in: ADR-0013: Positioning Within the Agent-Memory Literature

MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Packer et al.
date published: 2023
description: Prior art named in ADR-0013's Related-Work positioning. Formalizes a memory hierarchy with paging between context and external store. Its binding constraint is the context window; AKC (ADR-0010) names a different ceiling — human attention and judgment — so the two solve scarcity on different resources and can coexist.
grounded in: ADR-0013: Positioning Within the Agent-Memory Literature

ReMe: Remember Me, Refine Me
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Cao et al.
date published: 2025
description: Prior art named in ADR-0013's Related-Work positioning. A dynamic procedural-memory framework that continuously refines what is stored — a Curate-and-Promote loop by another name, run autonomously. AKC concedes the refinement operation as precedent and locates its delta in the structural human approval gate where ReMe runs without a human in the write path.
grounded in: ADR-0013: Positioning Within the Agent-Memory Literature

Agent Workflow Memory
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Wang et al.
date published: 2024
description: Prior art named in ADR-0013's Related-Work positioning. Induces commonly reused routines (workflows) from agent trajectories and feeds them back into subsequent generations — Extract-then-Promote without a human in the write path. AKC concedes the induction operation and contrasts on loop ownership and on optimizing the operator's judgment, not only the agent's task success.
grounded in: ADR-0013: Positioning Within the Agent-Memory Literature

Clarifying "AI alignment"
type: ExternalReference
type: TechArticle
author: Christiano, P.
date published: 2018
description: Vocabulary lineage named in ADR-0017. Coined intent alignment: an aligned AI "is trying to do what H wants it to do" — motivation, not competence. Treats the operator's wants as static; AKC's harness alignment extends the term to the configuration layer and across time, where intent itself evolves.
grounded in: ADR-0017: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift

Programs, Life Cycles, and Laws of Software Evolution
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Lehman, M. M.
date published: 1980
description: Vocabulary lineage named in ADR-0017. Law I (Continuing Change): an E-type program "undergoes continual change or becomes progressively less useful"; "evolution is an intrinsic, feedback driven, property of software" (Proceedings of the IEEE 68(9)). Lehman's driver of change is the world the program is embedded in; harness alignment's driver is the operator's evolving intent.
grounded in: ADR-0017: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift

Foundations for the Study of Software Architecture
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Perry, D. E. & Wolf, A. L.
date published: 1992
description: Vocabulary lineage named in ADR-0017. Defines architectural drift — "due to insensitivity about the architecture", leading "more to inadaptability than to disasters" (ACM SIGSOFT SEN 17(4)) — the canonical academic name for divergence-by-insensitivity. Assumes a fixed intended architecture; harness drift's reference point (operator intent) itself evolves.
grounded in: ADR-0017: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift

Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of U.S. Black Hawks over Northern Iraq
type: ExternalReference
type: Book
author: Snook, S. A.
date published: 2000
description: Vocabulary lineage named in ADR-0017. Names practical drift: practice slowly uncoupling from written procedure (cited as characterized in secondary literature; book text not directly verified). Names the failure process at the rules-vs-practice boundary; harness alignment names the counter-activity.
grounded in: ADR-0017: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift

Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnesses
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Lee, Y. et al.
date published: 2026
description: Contrast named in ADR-0017, and the framing ADR-0009 rejected for AKC itself. Defines the harness as "the code that determines what information to store, retrieve, and present to the model" and improves it autonomously against benchmark scores — harness optimization, the correctness axis. Harness alignment is the human-gated counterpart on the intent axis; the two are complementary, not competing.
grounded in: ADR-0017: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift
grounded in: ADR-0009: AKC is a Cycle, Not a Harness

Agent Drift: Quantifying Behavioral Degradation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems Over Extended Interactions
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Rath, A.
date published: 2026
description: Vocabulary lineage named in ADR-0017. Defines agent drift as "the progressive degradation of agent behavior, decision quality, and inter-agent coherence over extended interaction sequences" and semantic drift as "progressive deviation from original intent". Its reference list contains no classical software-engineering literature (no Lehman, Perry & Wolf, Parnas, or Snook) — the vocabulary gap harness drift bridges by explicit lineage to both bodies.
grounded in: ADR-0017: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift

Complacency and Bias in Human Use of Automation: An Attentional Integration
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Parasuraman, R. & Manzey, D. H.
date published: 2010
description: Empirical anchor for the failure twin's gate-complacency mode, located by the position paper (§6). Defines automation complacency operationally as poorer detection of system malfunctions under automation control compared with manual control, finds it reliability-dependent (33% failure detection under constant-reliability automation versus 82% under variable-reliability), and characterizes it as an active reallocation of attention under high workload, not passive laziness. The position paper holds the mapping as structural inference, not measurement on the cycle (ADR-0014 keeps the empirical layer out of the decision record by its own layer rule).
grounded in: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift: Why Intent, Unlike Correctness, Resists Automation

Ironies of Automation
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Bainbridge, L.
date published: 1983
description: Empirical anchor for the failure twin's deskilling mode, located by the position paper (§6): physical and cognitive skills deteriorate when not used, so a formerly experienced operator who has been monitoring an automated process may now be an inexperienced one — while the monitoring arrangement asks the operator to supervise a system installed precisely because it outperforms them. Held as structural inference, not measurement on the cycle.
grounded in: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift: Why Intent, Unlike Correctness, Resists Automation

What Twelve LLM Agent Benchmark Papers Disclose About Themselves: A Pilot Audit and an Open Scoring Schema
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Moghadasi, M. N. & Ghaderi, F.
date published: 2026
description: Term disambiguation recorded by the position paper's pre-deposit sweep: the only other use of "harness drift" found, meaning a benchmark-comparability defect — results produced on the same benchmark under different scaffolds circulating under the same name — not a configuration layer's uncoupling from operator intent (the AKC sense). Readers retrieving "harness drift" should disambiguate by this contrast.
grounded in: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift: Why Intent, Unlike Correctness, Resists Automation

Safe Multi-Agent Behavior Must Be Maintained, Not Merely Asserted: Constraint Drift in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Li, T. et al.
date published: 2026
description: One of three further 2026 drift coinages audited in the position paper's pre-deposit sweep (§6): constraint drift — the loss, distortion, weakening, or relaxation of constraints as they pass through memory, delegation, communication, tool use, audit, and optimization. Its reference list contains no classical software-evolution literature (no Lehman, Perry & Wolf, Parnas, or Snook) — part of the disconnection harness drift bridges by reference.
grounded in: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift: Why Intent, Unlike Correctness, Resists Automation

Governing Evolving Memory in LLM Agents: Risks, Mechanisms, and the Stability and Safety Governed Memory (SSGM) Framework
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Lam, C. et al.
date published: 2026
description: One of three further 2026 drift coinages audited in the position paper's pre-deposit sweep (§6): memory drift, with semantic, procedural, and goal sub-forms. Its reference list contains no classical software-evolution literature, while citing the agent-drift coining paper itself — evidence the drift vocabulary propagates within the 2026 agent literature while remaining severed from the classical lineage.
grounded in: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift: Why Intent, Unlike Correctness, Resists Automation

Meta-Cognitive Memory Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon LLM Agents
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Liu, Z. et al.
date published: 2026
description: One of three further 2026 drift coinages audited in the position paper's pre-deposit sweep (§6): belief deviation over long horizons. Its reference list contains no classical software-evolution literature — part of the disconnection harness drift bridges by reference.
grounded in: Harness Alignment and Harness Drift: Why Intent, Unlike Correctness, Resists Automation

GEO: Generative Engine Optimization
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Aggarwal, P. et al.
date published: 2023
description: Measurement framework behind the geo-writer snapshot in ADR-0010 — the first Measure-phase self-application to AKC's own documentation. The README is scored before and after the cognitive-economy change on GEO-derived checks (entity density, question-heading prominence, chunk self-containment, definition density), with both snapshots retained in version control so successive ADRs can track the README's GEO trajectory over time.
grounded in: ADR-0010: Human Cognitive Resource as Central Constraint

Truly Self-Improving Agents Require Intrinsic Metacognitive Learning
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Liu & van der Schaar
date published: 2025
description: Taxonomy named in ADR-0005's defense of the human approval gate. In its intrinsic/extrinsic distinction, AKC's gate is extrinsic metacognition — a human-designed loop with a human evaluator at the decision point — and stays so by design, not by immaturity: behavior-modifying writes remain gated because they are where the operator's evolving intent enters the loop.
grounded in: ADR-0005: Human Approval Gate for Behavior-Modifying Changes

Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineering
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Zhou et al.
date published: 2026
description: Field map named in ADR-0013's Related-Work positioning. Frames the field as three coupled forms of externalization — memory, skills, protocols — coordinated by harness engineering as the unification layer; AKC accepts that it sits squarely inside this frame, overlapping the memory and skills quadrants, and locates its delta in loop ownership rather than in the externalization operations themselves.
grounded in: ADR-0013: Positioning Within the Agent-Memory Literature

SkillOps: Managing LLM Agent Skill Libraries as Self-Maintaining Software Ecosystems
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Pu, Song & Zhao
date published: 2026
description: Prior art named in ADR-0013's 2026-06-25 addendum. Frames 'skill technical debt' and a four-dimension library-health diagnosis (utility, compatibility, risk, validation), and proposes a self-maintaining skill ecosystem that prunes, validates, and de-duplicates skills autonomously — the Curate and Maintain operations run without a human in the write path. AKC concedes the maintenance operations as precedent and locates its delta in the structural human approval gate (ADR-0005): SkillOps's defining adjective is self-maintaining, where AKC's Curate and Promote require named human sign-off.
grounded in: ADR-0013: Positioning Within the Agent-Memory Literature

SoK: Agentic Skills — Beyond Tool Use in LLM Agents
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Jiang et al.
date published: 2026
description: Field map named in ADR-0013's 2026-06-25 addendum. Maps a seven-stage skill lifecycle (discovery, practice, distillation, storage, retrieval, execution, evaluation/update) for the skill layer the way the Externalization survey maps the broader field. AKC's six-phase cycle overlaps this lifecycle; the delta is not the stages but loop ownership — the human approval gate — and the framing of human attention as the scarce resource.
grounded in: ADR-0013: Positioning Within the Agent-Memory Literature

How Well Do Agentic Skills Work in the Wild: Benchmarking LLM Skill Usage in Realistic Settings
type: ExternalReference
type: ScholarlyArticle
author: Liu et al.
date published: 2026
description: Empirical corroboration named in ADR-0013's 2026-06-25 addendum. Finds that skill benefits are fragile — degrading toward the no-skill baseline as the library grows large and uncurated and the agent must retrieve from many real-world skills rather than be handed a hand-crafted one. Independent support for ADR-0010's claim that curation is the load-bearing, attention-bound act: the scarce resource is the human judgment that decides what stays, not the storage that holds it. Corroboration rather than precedent.
grounded in: ADR-0013: Positioning Within the Agent-Memory Literature

Episode log JSON schema
type: CreativeWork
type: DataDownload
description: JSON schema for the Layer 1 episode log record. Append-only, daily-partitioned JSONL with owner-only permissions. Codifies the immutable source-of-truth shape (ADR-0002).
encoding format: application/schema+json
applies to: Episode Log (Layer 1)
grounded in: ADR-0002: Immutable Episode Log as Source of Truth

Knowledge store JSON schema
type: CreativeWork
type: DataDownload
description: JSON schema for the Layer 2 knowledge record. Time-decayed and forbidden-substring validated patterns distilled from Layer 1 episodes (ADR-0003).
encoding format: application/schema+json
applies to: Knowledge (Layer 2)
grounded in: ADR-0003: Three-Layer Distillation (Raw → Knowledge → Identity / Rules)

minimal_harness reference implementation
type: SoftwareSourceCode
description: ~500-line dependency-free Python reference demonstrating the three memory layers and the two-stage distill pipeline. Runs the cycle on behavioral patterns; the mechanism demo for ADR-0011 genre-neutrality (falsifiable commitment #1). Runnable end-to-end with `python3 -m examples.minimal_harness.demo`.
programming language: Python
code repository: agent-knowledge-cycle
implements: six-phase loop
grounded in: ADR-0003: Three-Layer Distillation (Raw → Knowledge → Identity / Rules)
grounded in: ADR-0004: Two-Stage Distill Pipeline (Free-form → Format)
grounded in: ADR-0011: Cycle Applies to Any Knowledge Body (Genre-Neutral)

AKC Cycle Rules (single-file install)
type: TechArticle
description: The entire AKC cycle as a single rules file, copy-installable to any agent's rules directory. Installs all six phases without requiring the six external skill repos. Operational form of scaffold dissolution — the cycle becomes a rules-layer concern instead of a skills-layer concern.
grounded in: ADR-0009: AKC is a Cycle, Not a Harness

when-code-when-llm (design-pattern skill)
type: TechArticle
description: Per-task decision: is this property structural or semantic? Long-form 'how' guide paired 1:1 with ADR-0008. Provides concrete patterns, code sketches, and audit checklists to operationalize the code-vs-LLM choice.
grounded in: ADR-0008: Code and LLM Collaboration

code-and-llm-collaboration (design-pattern skill)
type: TechArticle
description: Per-pipeline decision: how to layer code and LLM. Long-form 'how' guide paired 1:1 with ADR-0008. Realizes the four code-LLM layering patterns (guard, filter, judge, orchestrator) with concrete pipeline sketches.
grounded in: ADR-0008: Code and LLM Collaboration

signal-first-research (design-pattern skill)
type: TechArticle
description: Designing a research intake filter that admits only information likely to change the next action. Long-form 'how' guide paired 1:1 with ADR-0010. Operationalizes the signal-first principle as a Research-phase filter.
grounded in: ADR-0010: Human Cognitive Resource as Central Constraint