Architecture

1. What Vivary is

Vivary is a standard + scaffolder for agent-native workspaces. Like create-t3-app curates standalone best-in-class pieces into one coherent stack, create vivary composes standalone modules into a normalized agent workspace — for a second brain, a coding project, or a writing project, on any agent runtime (Claude Code, Codex CLI, …) and any stack.

The goal is normalization: today everyone hand-rolls their agent setup. Vivary makes the workspace a known, structured, portable thing.

2. The first-principles baseline

Four of Jeff’s repos turned out to be two ideas, one of them a single loop seen at two speeds:

• braincheck → loam — one knowledge-layer lineage (loam supersedes braincheck).
• throughline + flywheel — the same self-improving loop. throughline runs Ask→retrieve→act→verify→learn→gate every turn; flywheel distills what the loop learned into durable memory, playbooks, and skills on a heartbeat. Inner turn and outer turn of one mechanism.

The irreducible core, true of any agent workspace regardless of stack or task:

A self-improving loop running over a typed, navigable knowledge graph, with one visible state surface and human gates.

Design law (from throughline’s minimalism hypothesis): every always-on file competes with the user’s task for context. The framework must cost almost nothing to load. Fewer files, fewer words, more room for the work. This is the constraint that keeps Vivary from bloating into a heavy harness.

No lock-in (corollary): a workspace is plain Markdown + YAML plus a few zero-dependency CLIs. It works in any editor or none and on any agent runtime (Claude Code via .claude/, Codex via AGENTS.md + .agents/). tropo even ignores .obsidian/, .vscode/, etc. — no editor, plugin, or single-vendor agent is ever required.

3. The layer model

A vertical column. Each layer is a standalone package that reads/writes the same graph and obeys the same convention.

        exo      ── multi-agent orchestration            (outermost, optional)
       ozone     ── review: code + editorial / gates     (protective filter, optional)
       strato    ── agent OS: state · memory · loop · gates · self-improvement   (BASELINE)
       tropo     ── typed knowledge graph: what's true   (dense foundation, BASELINE)

• tropo (troposphere) — the dense, living foundation. Typed frontmatter → typed graph → search/navigation. Ground truth. (ported from loam)
• strato (stratosphere) — the stable layer above the churn. The visible state surface, compounding memory, the operating loop, human gates, and the self-improvement that falls out of learn over time. (throughline + flywheel, fused)
• ozone — the protective filter. Review for code and prose; a specialized verify/gate step. (optional)
• exo — the outermost layer. Coordination when one agent becomes many. (optional)

Baseline = tropo + strato (knowledge + the self-improving loop over it). ozone and exo snap on as needed.

4. The moat

Existing harnesses persist flat context — specs and memory dumped into Markdown. Vivary’s differentiators:

1. Typed knowledge graph substrate, not flat memory (tropo).
2. Blast-radius / impact reasoning — show what a change touches, before and after, visually, in a way a text diff cannot. (tropo’s graph roadmap.)
3. Medium-agnostic — code review and editorial review are the same layer (ozone) with different rule packs.
4. A standardized agent workspace — uncovered ground.

5. Naming & namespace

The brand owns the namespace; modules are scoped under it, so globally-taken bare words (ozone, tropo) stop mattering:

• npm: @vivary/tropo, @vivary/strato, …
• PyPI: vivary-tropo, vivary-strato, … (PyPI has no scopes — prefix instead)
• one GitHub org holds every module repo

vivary is free on npm and PyPI. The bare github.com/vivary login is a dead account, so the org needs a handle variant (e.g. vivary-dev). See HANDOFF.

6. Module naming = atmosphere strata

The vertical column is named by altitude: tropo (troposphere, ground-hugging and dense) → strato (stratosphere, stable) → ozone (the protective layer) → exo (exosphere, the boundary to space). A vivary contains its own atmosphere, so the metaphor nests cleanly: the world (Vivary) and its layers (the strata).