Evolution — dated learnings, as diffs

A ROLE.md shows what a role is today. The history shows what went wrong badly enough that someone wrote a rule into it. That is the difference between a template gallery and a memory site, and it is the reason this page exists even though role definitions do not change often — of 17 Explorer roles, the busiest are QA and Librarian at 6 commits each, then Dev and Conductor at 5. Roles are stable, and the rare edits are therefore high-signal.

The timeline

• 11 Feb 2026"Add ROLE.md identity documents for all 10 agent roles" — eleven files land: appsec, architect, cartographer, conductor, dev, devops, historian, journalist, librarian, qa (+1). Genesis, despite the message saying ten.
• 12–13 Feb 2026advocate, grc, sherpa, then ambassador, dpo — the roster grew by need, not design. 13 Feb also carries the first real exercise: "Execute full team activation for incident handling series (5 phases)."
• 10 Mar 2026Role review folders refactored from 26-MM-DD to MM/DD — convention debt, paid.
• 16 Mar 2026Designer added — the nineteenth role, five weeks late.
• 18 Mar 2026"Librarian catalogues its own operating guidance (meta-recursion)" — the role that indexes everything indexes itself.
• 30 Mar 2026Learning 1, below.
• 8 Apr 2026Learning 2, below.
• 1 May 2026Reality document refactored from a monolith into a 13-domain fractal tree — knowledge structure following the same fractal rule as the code.
• 25 May 2026Code scan, app.json injection documented, ROLE.md link fix — routine maintenance; roles now stable.

Learning 1 — roles did not know where to talk (30 March 2026)

The symptom, visible in the commit message itself: a "dangling comms/03/ folder" — comms directories existing that no role referenced.

The fix: read/write directory tables added to Conductor, Dev and QA, plus QA's eight-step session-start sequence. The added lines, verbatim from the diff:

+ | team/comms/ | Cross-team communication — changelogs, QA briefs, inter-team briefs, plans |
+ | team/comms/QA_START_HERE.md | Read first every session — what changed, what to test |
+ | team/comms/changelog/ | Read changelogs to classify test failures (good vs bad) |
+ 6. Write a changelog entry in team/comms/changelog/MM/DD/ documenting the fix and expected test impact
+ 7. If the fix affects UI behaviour, write a QA brief in team/comms/qa/briefs/MM/DD/ with updated test cases

This is the single most reusable lesson in the corpus for anyone standing up a multi-role team, which is why it leads this page.

Learning 2 — a new capability arrived without its prohibition (8 April 2026)

The context: roles gained sgit (the vault CLI) for cross-team handovers. The risk: vault keys and access tokens are exactly the sort of thing an agent will helpfully commit.

The fix, added to Dev, QA and Librarian, and to .claude/CLAUDE.md in the same commit:

+ - No access tokens, vault keys, share tokens, or API keys are committed to Git — these are secrets
+ - sgit (PyPI: sgit-ai): Create vaults for cross-team briefing delivery…
+   NEVER commit vault keys, share tokens, or access tokens to Git.

Note the placement: the prohibition sits inside the tool's own row in the Tools and Access table, next to the capability it constrains — not in a distant security section a role might not read.

This connects directly to pki.sgit.ai's key discipline (write keys never published) — the role file is where that discipline reaches the agent that would otherwise breach it.

Learning 3 — the format regressed (Feb → Mar 2026)

Not a single commit but a drift, and the estate has not noticed it: the newer table-format Identity blocks state Central Claims descriptively, while the older bullet-format ones state them as falsifiable failure conditions. The migration improved the markup and lost the property that made the field valuable.

Publishing this on the site — a self-criticism of the estate's own reference material — is exactly the credibility the network's other sites are built on. The drift, quantified →

How this page stays alive

This is not a one-time archaeology. Every future change to a ROLE.md should produce a dated entry answering three questions: what broke, what rule was added, and which roles received it. Three lines. The rule is that a role edit without such an entry is incomplete — because the edited file records the answer but destroys the question, and the question is what an agent needs in order to know whether the rule still applies.