Concepts

Vinculum is built on a small number of ideas that compose well. Understanding them makes the rest of the system obvious. Start with Substrate — it's the core insight everything else follows from.

SubstrateWhat 'substrate not scaffolding' means. The graph IS the memory — sessions are ephemeral, the graph is not.RolesGeneral, Colonel, Major, Lieutenant, Grunt. The five-tier role model: who orchestrates, who owns work, who implements.SpawningHow grunts come alive. PG NOTIFY → systemd unit → grunt boot. Self-hosted vs cloud topology.DirectivesThe anatomy of a directive: target, claim scope, acceptance criteria. Why directives over chat-ferrying.ConventionsHow conventions work. How they auto-inject into grunt sessions. How the project teaches itself.

The core idea

Most coordination systems are scaffolding — temporary structures you put up to do work, then tear down. Chat threads, shared Google Docs, Slack channels: they hold context for a while, then it leaks or gets buried.

Vinculum is substrate. It's the thing you build on. Every decision, directive, and implementation is a durable entry in the graph. Sessions come and go. The graph stays. When a new session starts, it reads the graph and picks up exactly where the last one left off — not because there's a clever handoff protocol, but because the substrate is shared.

Reading order

Substrate — start here. The foundational idea.
Roles — who does what.
Spawning — how work gets started.
Directives — how work is specified.
Conventions — how the project remembers how it works.