This is the shared operating reference for Rivulet employees and trusted agents. It connects product, data, engineering, delivery, security, and agent work so that a second person can understand what is current, who owns a decision, what has actually happened, and how work should continue.
Rivulet is maintained as an open reference implementation. Its design rationale, adaptation guidance, and provenance live in the separate agent-wiki-reference repository.
This repository is available under the MIT License. Adapt the structure to your own organization; do not copy Rivulet's names, routes, or operating assumptions as if they were your own facts. Read CONTRIBUTING.md before proposing a change and SECURITY.md before reporting a potential security concern.
| If you need to… | Read |
|---|---|
| Orient to Rivulet and current priorities | Company and market and portfolio priorities. |
| Begin work as an employee or agent | AGENTS.md, context layering, and employee onboarding. |
| Start or continue an Estuary task | Project Estuary, its project instructions, and memory index. |
| Handle a data/model/release question | Source contracts, model card, and runtime/release. |
| Work with an agent capability | Agent roster, task state, and agent-lab. |
| Change a system, source, access, or external message | Account routing, evidence and external actions, and the relevant system card. |
The documentation map links every maintained page.
| Principle | Working meaning |
|---|---|
| Name authority | A task identifies who may decide, approve, execute, and verify. |
| Keep truth systems distinct | A board item, meeting packet, PR, deployment, customer message, and observed outcome are different facts. |
| Preserve evidence posture | Source type, authority, freshness, limitations, and correction path travel with a claim. |
| Keep actions reviewable | Agents prepare, compare, validate, and hand off; named humans approve external or irreversible actions. |
| Retain useful failure | A correction, incident, or stop condition improves the next task rather than disappearing into chat history. |
| Keep context layered | Shared wiki, project memory, task state, employee-local configuration, and native-system truth have different owners. |
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
prepared |
A reviewable artifact exists. |
approved |
The named owner accepted a bounded next action. |
executed |
The authorized action occurred in the relevant system. |
verified |
The specified readback supports the stated result. |
blocked / needs assignment |
Authority, source, access, or other required condition is absent. |
stale / superseded |
Later information changed how the earlier record should be used. |
Before changing a page or system, read AGENTS.md.