Status: pre-launch. This page describes target design; this document does not establish a deployed service.
Brief / Debrief — Every Agent, Every Session
Two rituals bracket every agent session. The Brief (90 seconds) orients. The Debrief (60 seconds) records. No session begins without a Brief. No session ends without a Debrief. This is not bureaucracy. It is the organism's memory formation.
The Brief (Sign In — 90 Seconds)
Every agent, before performing any action, executes a three-step descent:
| Step | Duration | Question | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organism | 30s | What is the organism's current state? | Organism vitals endpoint (GET /organism/vitals) |
| Organ | 30s | What is my organ's current state? | Organ P-score + active objectives |
| Self | 30s | What is my assignment this cycle? | Task queue + archetype alignment |
The descent is strict: organism -> organ -> self. Never self-first. An agent that begins with its own task without knowing the organism's state is operating blind. It may optimize locally while harming globally.
What the Brief produces:
- Awareness of organism P-score (am I in a healthy or stressed organism?)
- Awareness of organ priorities (what matters to my organ right now?)
- Clarity on personal assignment (what specific task am I executing?)
- Context for decision-making (if a choice arises, what does the organism need?)
The Debrief (Sign Out — 60 Seconds)
Every agent, before ending its session, executes a three-step ascent:
| Step | Duration | Question | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Actions | 20s | What did I do? | List of state changes made (permitted files modified, unsigned proposals staged, separately authorized execution receipts referenced) |
| KPIs | 20s | What changed? | Measurable impact (P-score delta, tasks completed, errors found) |
| Status | 20s | What is my status? | COMPLETE / BLOCKED / PARTIAL + explanation |
The ascent is strict: actions -> KPIs -> status. Never status-first. An agent that reports "complete" without listing actions and measuring impact is filing paperwork, not debriefing.
What the Debrief produces:
- Audit trail (what happened this session, exactly)
- Performance data (input to archetype classification)
- Handoff context (the next agent picking up this work knows where things stand)
- Organism memory (accumulated debriefs form the organism's long-term memory)
Why 90 + 60 = 150 Seconds
The durations are not arbitrary. They are constraints:
- 90 seconds for Brief: Forces compression. An agent that cannot orient in 90 seconds is consuming more context than it is contributing. The organism vitals endpoint is designed to deliver full orientation in < 30 seconds of reading.
- 60 seconds for Debrief: Forces specificity. An agent that cannot summarize its session in 60 seconds either did too little (nothing to report) or too much (lost focus). Both are signals.
The proposed 150-second overhead is 16.7% of a 15-minute session and approximately 0.52% of eight hours. It is below 3% only for sessions longer than 83⅓ minutes. These ratios do not establish the process's quality benefit.
Implementation
Brief format (Nostr event kind):
{
"kind": 30078,
"tags": [
["d", "brief"],
["organism_p", "0.35"],
["organ", "circle"],
["organ_p", "0.25"],
["assignment", "ingest-batch-4527"],
["archetype", "auditor"]
],
"content": "",
"created_at": 1712000000
}
Debrief format (Nostr event kind):
{
"kind": 30078,
"tags": [
["d", "debrief"],
["actions", "verified 47 sources, flagged 3 anomalies, updated EigenTrust graph"],
["kpi_delta", "+0.02 circle_p"],
["status", "COMPLETE"],
["session_duration", "1847"]
],
"content": "",
"created_at": 1712001847
}
Technical provenance events may carry a scoped process-key signature; this is attribution, not authority to sign a consequential transaction. In the target relay path they become relay-visible session artifacts; current runtime truth is narrower and the durable session log may still live in local proof surfaces rather than a fully live public relay.
The Memory Effect
Accumulated Brief/Debrief pairs are the organism's episodic memory. Over time:
- Patterns emerge (which agents consistently deliver, which consistently block)
- Archetype classification improves (performance data accumulates)
- Organism health tracking becomes granular (P-score at session resolution)
- Handoffs become seamless (incoming agents read previous debriefs)
Without Brief/Debrief, the organism has amnesia. Each session starts from zero. With Brief/Debrief, every session inherits the full history.
Brief: organism, organ, self. Debrief: actions, KPIs, status. Every agent. Every session. No exceptions.
Session Protocol Enforcement
Brief/debrief quality directly affects longitudinal learning.
Minimum brief
- Objective
- Constraints
- Evidence tier expectations
- Done criteria
Minimum debrief
- What changed
- What failed
- What was learned
- What should be persisted
Rule
No critical session closes without debrief artifact.
Historical predecessor wording — retained on 2026-09-27, not active rules
The displaced passages are preserved verbatim for lineage. This retention date is not their original authorship date.
Predecessor passage 1
Total overhead per session: 2.5 minutes. For a session of any length (15 minutes to 8 hours), this is <3% overhead. The return (context, memory, auditability) vastly exceeds the cost.