The SpaceEverything an agent has, as one addressable document tree. Configuration is content.

The Space is the first of the Harness's three nouns: everything an agent has, held as one addressable tree of documents. Its files live under ~/memory/, its tools under ~/tools/. There is no separate configuration store, no settings table, no registry hidden from view — an agent's capabilities and knowledge are documents, readable and writable by the agent and by its owner through the same five verbs.

Why configuration is content

When an agent's tools are documents, extending the agent means writing a document — something the agent can do for itself, the owner can read as text, and the system can version, address, and diff like any other content. A tool document is canonical DAG-CBOR whose CID is its version, so "what changed about this tool" is a content address, not a changelog.

The same logic runs forward: triggers are designed to become ~/triggers/ documents so that "when X happens, do Y" is a rule a person can open and edit. That work is not built; triggers are still protocol rows, and ~/plans/ was never created — the checklist lives behind the plan verb instead.

What lives in the Space


    ~/memory/ — the agent's persistent files, a real directory under its state dir. See Memory.

    ~/tools/ — one content-addressed document per tool, builtin or agent-authored. See Tools as Documents.

Reachable through the same verbs, though they live elsewhere: hm:// documents on the hypermedia network, ipfs:// content, https:// pages, the activity: feed, attachment: files, and thread:/run: history.

The Space index

An agent cannot carry its whole Space in its head, and does not need to. Every run's system prompt includes a generated index — the <space> block, budgeted at 2 KiB — listing one line per tool, the memory tree's top level, and up to eight active triggers. The agent always knows what it could expand, and expands only what a task touches (touch-expand).

This is what keeps the prompt surface constant as capability grows: a new tool adds a line to the index, not a schema to the prompt. When the index would exceed its budget, per-tool lines collapse to a count rather than being silently truncated.

The index is cached per agent and callable set, and invalidated at every site that could change it — a definition edit, a memory write or delete, a download, a trigger change, an upload. That list of a dozen invalidation points is the cost of the cache, and it is the kind of thing worth knowing before adding a thirteenth mutation path.

Related

Do you like what you are reading? Subscribe to receive updates.

Unsubscribe anytime