High-Velocity Governance for Multi-Agent Squads and Orchestration.
A governing AI memory scaffold to catch drift before tech debt becomes a thing and AI memory collapse occurs.
| Component | Status | Mandate |
|---|---|---|
| Policy | STABLE |
Operational Governance |
| Watchdog | VIGILANT |
Memory Integrity & Drift Detection |
| State-Bus | PERSISTENT |
Session Continuity & Recovery |
| The Canon | LOCKED |
Structural Verification (PLTRF) |
Bamboo transforms a standard repository into a Governed Workspace. It provides the stable policy, memory, and resource limits required to manage high-fidelity projects.
We prioritize Physics over Liturgy: if a rule cannot be reduced to a file path, a script exit code, or a resource ceiling, it doesn't belong in the canon.
The fastest path to a governed repo is the Use this template button.
Drop these into your project root to establish the behavioral baseline:
AGENT.md: The cold-start router (MUST include Session Identity).Bamboo.md: The operational policy layer.behavior/: The 3-concept ruleset and decoder ring.docs/ctx-orientation.md: Your project's narrative history.
The core discipline is vendor-neutral and dependency-free.
For multi-agent or complex environments, the Bamboo OS runtime extension provides the high-fidelity chassis for lifecycle management, integrity heartbeat, and event-driven sync.
Access to the runtime engine is managed via the private BAMBOO-OS repository.
To protect cold-start economics, Bamboo mandates only three load-bearing concepts. Everything else is an extension.
- Knobs ⭐: The unit of narrative state change. Every meaningful architectural state transition earns a dated, narrative entry in the orientation log. We log the "Why", not just the code.
- PLTRF 🏗️: Preventative Long-Term Repo Fragmentation. The binary discipline of structural integrity. One canonical home per concept. Broken references, decaying links, or orphaned files are build-failing compilation errors.
- Tiering ❄️: Memory preservation via Hot/Warm/Cold/Ice classification. Keep working memory lean, archive the rest, and freeze files > 6 months old to prevent retrieval drift.
architecture/: Advanced memory systems (ADM/RAG/Watchdog/OKI).- BAMBOO-OS: The private runtime engine (Scripts, Schemas, Multi-agent Topology).
skills/: Portable AI capabilities and vendor-specific overlays.design/: UI/UX standards and component rules.
Bamboo is a synthesis of established work across information theory, cognitive science, and AI engineering:
- Information entropy — Shannon (1948)¹. Entropy as a measure of disorder gives the vocabulary for context entropy.
- Working memory limits — Miller (1956)². The "magical number seven" establishes the need for Knob-based chunking.
- Cognitive load theory — Sweller (1988)³. PLTRF discipline is a sustained attack on extraneous cognitive load.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) — Lewis et al. (2020)⁴. Bamboo is a structural RAG complement.
- Long-context degradation — Liu et al. (2023)⁵, "Lost in the Middle." Empirical validation for the "newest at the top" Knob log rule.
For the deep theoretical treatment, see Documentation.md.
- 2026-07-01: Formally shakedown-tested the Operational Knowledge Integrity (OKI) and Repository Understanding Health (RUH) frameworks in multi-agent simulation and orchestration environments.
- 2026-06-13: Bamboo has a CI gate that fails the build when an agent violates a mandatory rule. Partitioned core discipline and OS into separate repositories. Finalized Governance Core and Session Identity Clause.
- 2026-06-03: Introduced root
Bamboo.mdand separated policy from routing. - 2026-05-28: Added Memory Watchdog and Drift to the architecture layer.
Created and maintained by Matt Stenquist. Special thanks to testing contributors for production-testing the chassis.
References
- Shannon, C. E. (1948). "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." Bell System Technical Journal.
- Miller, G. A. (1956). "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two." Psychological Review.
- Sweller, J. (1988). "Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning." Cognitive Science.
- Lewis, P. et al. (2020). "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks." NeurIPS.
- Liu, N. F. et al. (2023). "Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts." arXiv:2307.03172.
Bamboo is source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 — free for noncommercial use (personal, research, evaluation, education, nonprofit). Any commercial use requires a separate commercial license; see COMMERCIAL.md.