Patterns in the Agentic Atlas

the prerequisite substrate and residence test

the skill-packaging Hello World and reference shape for skill-facing nodes

a real runnable skill (the artifact is the example)

expectations at a seam, from informal prose to enforced structure

both sides of a seam import one shared request-and-return shape

contract ↔ verification ↔ re-dispatch

a deterministic duck census rejects one manifest and turns its errors into a bounded redispatch

the parent-child execution primitive; serial, parallel, joined, or fire-and-forget

each turn is conditioned on retained history again; logical reinjection yields a cost face and an explicit-state recovery face

the precondition under "discard is cheaper than repairing"

one rejected weather bulletin shows when to discard, retry, undo, or stop before acting

why checking ≪ doing lets verification work at all; the ladder + coverage, and the three failure modes (coverage exhaustion / discrimination collapse / quantifier inversion)

statics — the price list: denominations, the quality curve, cost classes, time value

one 30-turn session billed, then re-billed under six single-decision shifts

dynamics — admission, residency, and eviction; placement and recall within residency

resident context steers, not just informs — path dependence, and eviction's second motive

Laban's sharded conversations drop 39%; the same shards in one fresh prompt hold 95.1% — a control that never got lost, not a recovery rate

change when or whose window pays; may compose with selection or distillation

one 10,000-token guide moves later or elsewhere, exposing the difference between an actor's bill and the system's

the load-in-place branch: defer by probability and lateness of need — a 50-token pointer buys ~60× on the session that never fires

the authored-heavy specialization: disk-resident, grep-addressable — pay for the size of the answer

an 800-document shelf cannot enter a 200k-token window; one incident-code query admits one answer-sized runbook

the dispatch-elsewhere branch

a full agent investigates in parallel; its working set stays elsewhere and only the verdict returns

the authored-heavy specialization

a large reference baked into the agent; narrow questions in, distilled answers out — the orchestrator never loads the docs