The three topologies
The estate contains three staffed teams using the same role names with different mandates, and the naming is Wardley's: Explorer (pioneer), Villager (settler), Town Planner. This is Pioneers–Settlers–Town Planners implemented as agent configurations rather than drawn as a diagram — and as far as the commissioning pack can determine, nobody else has published this. It should be, and is, this site's second most important page.
For Pioneers–Settlers–Town Planners itself — the evolution axes, the model in general — wardley-maps.sgit.ai owns the material. This page owns only the staffing of it as three agent teams, which is original.
What each team is for
| Explorer | Villager | Town Planner | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mandate | Build the new thing | Harden what exists | Industrialise and capitalise |
| Roles | 17 dirs / 13 defined | 17 / 17 | 4 / 3 |
| Governing rule | Discover | "Harden, do not build" | Classify and fund |
| On a needed redesign | Do it | Send it back to Explorer | — |
Villager — the mandate, in the role files' own words
Not inferred — stated in the role files themselves:
The code works. Your job is to make it work reliably under production conditions.
Preserve behaviour exactly — every change must produce identical outputs for identical inputs. If behaviour changes, send it back to Explorer.
User experience is frozen — the UX as delivered by Explorer is what ships. No additions, no changes.
Harden, do not redesign — security architecture is frozen from Explorer. Harden what exists. If a redesign is needed, send it back.
And the corresponding exclusions, in the role files' own phrasing:
Do NOT design new UX features — send to Explorer.
Do NOT redesign security architecture — that's Explorer territory.
Town Planner — a sketch, not a template
Small and commercial: the Accountant "provides the financial models and projections that the Alchemist wraps in investor narrative," with the Cartographer supplying "maturity classification (Genesis/Custom/Product/Commodity) and Wardley map financial flows" — the evolution axis reappearing as the thing that decides which team owns a component.
Publish it as a sketch. Four directories, three definitions, its Librarian missing, and its content is investor-facing rather than operational. This site does not write the missing Librarian for it.
Why this solves a real problem
The failure mode in multi-agent systems is not incapacity; it is an agent improving something it was asked to preserve. A capable model handed hardening work will notice a better design and implement it, and the result is a system that never stabilises because every pass rewrites the previous one.
The Villager mandate is a refusal engineered into the role: preserve behaviour exactly, and when you see something better, hand it back rather than build it. That is a genuinely hard instruction to give a capable generalist, and writing it into the role definition — with the destination named — is what makes it stick.
The handback rules, as a table
| Frozen in Villager | Where a needed change goes |
|---|---|
| Behaviour / outputs | Send back to Explorer if a change is needed |
| User experience | Send back to Explorer — no additions, no changes |
| Security architecture | Send back to Explorer — Villager hardens, never redesigns |
The same role, three ways
Designer is the best single example, existing in all three teams: creating UX in Explorer, guarding frozen UX in Villager, and shaping investor-facing material in Town Planner. One page, showing one role's three definitions →
The honest caveats
- The transition is undocumented. Nothing in the corpus states when a component moves from Explorer to Villager, or who decides. The Cartographer's Genesis/Custom/Product/Commodity classification is the obvious candidate, but that connection is this pack's inference, not the corpus's statement. Until the founder writes it, this site says the trigger is undefined — G2.
- Explorer/Villager may have been driven by context limits as much as by Wardley theory. Running one enormous team is impractical, and splitting it is convenient. A discovered-then-rationalised pattern is still a good pattern, and the honesty is worth more than the theory — Q1.