Architecture
Protocol repo defines standards; this repo demonstrates implementations.
Pieces
- Manifest (
examples/<name>/.living/manifest.yaml): declares the agent’s capabilities, isolation, state target and logging. Format defined by living-repos-protocol.
- Bootstrap (for example
examples/hello/bootstrap.py): reads the manifest, refuses unsupported capabilities, runs tasks and publishes state.
- Pin (
PROTOCOL_VERSION): the protocol release every example is validated against.
- CI: lints Markdown, validates every manifest against the pinned schema and smoke-runs each demo against its expected output.
Flow
- Clone the repository.
- A runtime (here, the bootstrap script) reads
.living/manifest.yaml.
- It checks the declared capabilities against what it supports and stops if any are missing.
- It runs the agent’s tasks inside the declared isolation profile.
- It publishes state to the declared target and logs in the declared format.
Decisions
- Each example is self-contained in its own directory, so it can be copied out as a starting point.
- Demos must be deterministic so CI can diff their output.
- Validation uses the published protocol schema, never a local copy, so drift shows up as a CI failure.
Open questions
- How to run
dedicated-vm demos in CI. container and sandbox-process demos run in Docker through scripts/run_isolated.sh.
- How to show handoff between two runtimes in a single repository.