Guideposts for the Work

Ontology (what the world is made of)

• Everything is an affordance. Treat the web as a field of actions, not pages. Resources announce what can be done (schemas, contracts), not how it looks.
• Text-as-Runtime. Structured text (manifests, intents, plans) is living substrate—directly operable by agents and legible to humans. UI is a projection, not the ground.
• Embeddings are the world-model. With PRH/MTR-style refinement, embeddings become the shared coordinate system for perception, memory, routing, and planning.
• Presentation precedes representation. First the operative substrate (affordances, embeddings), then optional narratives/views. Bodies act before they narrate.

Architecture (how pieces fit)

• Small LMs as controllers, not temples. Keep LMs hot-swappable policy slots. The center of gravity is memory (embeddings) + tools (affordances) + contracts.
• Actor boundaries, boring adapters. Paseo's value is at seams: embedding store actor, tool registry, policy layer. Everything else is pluggable behind <200-LOC adapters.
• Matryoshka retrieval as default. Coarse slice → broad recall; rerank with full vectors. Cost and latency are dials on the same substrate.
• Policy over prompt. Put safety, budgets, and inclusion in enforceable contracts (schemas, capabilities, feature gates), not in model "goodwill."

Epistemics & Safety (how we know and don't break)

• Failure is first-class. Hamilton's ethos: expect void turns, partial plans, flaky tools. Filter, retry, and learn procedurally—don't paper it over with prompts.
• Natural > skeuomorphic transformations. Prefer mappings that preserve structure (affordance → affordance) over those that preserve appearance (button → button). Aim for commutative diagrams between human view and agent protocol.
• Latent interpretability as policy substrate. As features become readable, gate behaviors at the representation layer (feature monitors, audits), making justice/inclusion systemic.

Political economy (where power shifts)

• From persuasion to contract. Page-centric moats (dark patterns, friction) erode. Value accrues to clear affordances, verifiable outcomes, and reliable logs.
• From spectacle to quiet infrastructure. Success looks like disappearance: things work because the substrate is simple, inspectable, and composable.

Practice (how to actually move)

• Affordance-first API design. /.well-known/agent manifests, strong JSON Schemas, idempotency keys, event streams. Treat UI as print-on-demand from the same source.
• Unix mindset at network scale. Compose affordances like pipes: search → reserve → pay. Keep programs living in the textual substrate; views are optional layers.
• Learning at the edges. Train small controllers on trajectories + rewards emitted by the system (void-turn filters, verifiable outcomes). Don't entangle core behavior with model quirks.

Vocabulary (short handles we can reuse)

• "From Page to Field." The atomic unit is the affordance, not the page.
• "Text is the runtime." The canonical place both humans and agents meet.
• "Embeddings are memory." One space, many views.
• "Policy, not pleasantry." Ethics encoded as contracts, not vibes.
• "Natural transformations." Human view and agent protocol commute to the same invariant.