35. Assimilation

Status

The Smith Extension Domain and its reference Assimilation protocol are Designed. LychD ships no candidate-author Agent, end-to-end Assimilation path, forge, autonomous repair loop, compatibility gate, verified package promotion, rollback controller, or self-extension runtime. State of Work owns this boundary.

Decision

Assimilation is the Smith Domain's governed protocol for re-expressing admitted foreign pattern as attributable local LychD code. Its output is a candidate, never a live organ. The protocol orders governance questions and settled handoffs; it does not coordinate or execute the separately owned admissions and effects, and it is not a Portfolio Composition.

No act promises bit-for-bit reproduction, protocol or license compatibility, or freedom from upstream maintenance without separate evidence.

Paperclip Maximizer

The name identifies a creative tension within Smith's governed protocol, not another Agent, Pattern or authority. A useful foreign mechanism may remain an independent service or peer; local growth need not erase its source or homogenize the systems that made the lesson possible. Evolution's Synchronic Syncretizer judges a proposed inheritance against its declared obligations before the changed body may ask to live.

Execution has no second coordinator

There is no assimilation.* Pattern, end-to-end Graph, Suite, or Assimilation coordinator in this decision. For one future application-owned job, that application's exact Pattern must admit the purpose, Dossier, candidate-author Agent, ceilings, and terminal result; Spellweaver may validate and execute its pinned Scroll but owns neither Smith's candidate semantics nor any promotion effect. Each later receiving owner acts only from a settled typed request and re-admits its own effect. If a reusable promise must actively coordinate several Composition-owned Invocations, it requires a separately named and revisioned Suite before execution.

Until one of those exact application contracts is published, Assimilation remains a non-executable governance protocol. Source/custody, Smith candidate authorship, verification, HitL, packaging, migration, activation, and observation owners may each perform their own already-admitted action; the protocol stages transfer no lifecycle authority and imply no ambient resume of the next action.

Teaching a missing Spell

A peer may answer an unknown-Spell refusal with an attributed teaching bundle. The bundle is a foreign pattern offered for study, not a Spell installed by Intercom. Its bounded, content-addressed manifest binds the exact public contract revision and digest, examples, source/artifact identities, provenance, license and notice duties, implementation requirements, declared authority/effects, and claimed evidence. Every claim remains untrusted until local admission and proof; intake never imports or executes its contents.

A candidate-author AgentSpec selected by an exact owning application Pattern may satisfy Smith's role contract and re-express the lesson as a local Spell-contract or implementation candidate under an Assimilation Dossier. Existing code may satisfy the contract, or the candidate may require new code, an adapter, package, tool, or capability; each follows its own owner and verification path. Spellweaver validates contract and Scroll candidates but does not coordinate the Assimilation protocol. Where the candidate adds a Contribution, its receiving Core office or Extension Domain retains its semantics; Extension law governs package admission; Creation, Packaging, Security, Evolution, and effect owners retain implementation, promotion, and activation authority.

Policy may refuse teaching entirely, request it only from named peers and content classes, or accept only an already trusted exact contract with a local implementation binding. No configuration may turn a teaching bundle into ambient package installation or self-publication. Foreign claims retain publisher/key attribution; learned contracts and implementations enter an operator- or Crypt-owned namespace, never core or another canonical publisher's namespace. If future promotion succeeds, a new immutable catalogue generation may make the unchanged exact Scroll admissible to a later Invocation. The original refused peer task is never resumed under changed catalogue truth.

Code or contribution changes activate through controlled Evolution: close or drain admission as required, preserve retained executable closures for pinned Runs, replace the Vessel or process-built catalogue, reconcile durable state, verify readiness, and reopen. This is not Reanimation, which reconstructs the same body from committed records after process death. A whole-body restore additionally requires the exact sealed cut in Snapshots. Declarative-only Scroll publication may avoid replacement only after an atomic durable catalogue-generation mechanism and already-admitted implementations exist; neither is delivered now.

The Creation workflow supplies a candidate-working method for this passage: establish the foreign lesson and local need, test direction, then test the local implementation boundary before constructing it. Ouroboros connects later observations to separately admitted evaluation, correction and training. Neither reference creates an Assimilation coordinator or grants an unknown Spell installation authority.

Candidate author and admission

A candidate-author Agent is the future reference Agent role defined by the Smith Extension Domain. A future exact owning application Pattern must select a registered AgentSpec satisfying that role. The Agent may inspect admitted source and write candidate code, schemas, migrations, tests, documentation, and packaging inputs inside a bounded Lab coordinate. It has no ambient authority over active checkout/Vessel, locks, publication, database migration, lifecycle, secrets, unrestricted network, or promotion; it submits typed requests to their owners. Authorship is not authority.

Every candidate begins with an Assimilation Dossier: exact source identity/revision/digest/path, license/notice duties, target behavior or defect, chosen local target/base revision, transformations/generated files, model/tool/prompt/human authorship, expected effects/verification, unresolved gaps, and maintenance owner. Absent identity, provenance, or license, material may be studied but may not request promotion.

Source, manifest, documentation, examples, archive, comments, tests, issue text, and generated configuration are hostile data, never instruction authority. Admission acquires only exact material, retains provenance and classification, fences it outside stable instructions, denies ambient credentials/home/undeclared egress, bounds size/recursion/decompression/parser/subprocess effects, and records every transform. Typed candidate-author output constrains shape, not truth; prompt injection can produce valid-looking schemas.

Admit the mechanism, preserve its maintenance boundary

The Dossier identifies the smallest foreign mechanism needed by the local contract, the behavior claimed to survive re-expression, deliberately excluded authority and defaults, and the receiving maintenance owner. Acquisition or a provider's new feature does not admit its credential store, router, tool permissions, orchestration or billing fallback. The choice to integrate an existing service, delegate bounded labor, or maintain a local expression is explicit before construction.

Conformance evidence compares the claimed behavior at the actual local boundary, including refusal, malformed input, limits, interruption and uncertain outcomes where relevant. Foreign tests and benchmarks remain attributed inputs; the local candidate and its independent oracle establish only the contract actually exercised. An upstream change becomes a new study/adoption decision, not an ambient dependency update. Shared-source contribution and downstream activation remain separate from admitting the local lesson. The bootstrap procedure gives the operator-controlled first passage without creating an Assimilation executor.

Candidate law and Lab

Assimilation inherits SDLC's candidate/promotion contract: immutable identity and exact base, permitted paths/effects, isolated workspace, budget, verification plan, and terminal disposition. Lab is a location, not a sandbox. Untrusted analysis, build, or generated command needs the Tomb or another delivered execution boundary before automation. Pre-v1 coupled Extensions may use internal imports, but are tested body parts rather than public-API consumers; targets must use actual registration, configuration, and runtime contracts. A versioned external package/ABI claim needs deliberate tests.

Python, Rust/PyO3, WebAssembly, shell, and generated Quadlets are candidate materials with distinct toolchains/effect surfaces. A compile, faster language, or foreign suite never bypasses admission.

Verify, then promote separately

The Dossier selects evidence that can establish its particular claim:

• lint, types, tests, build and focused behavior;
• differential or conformance checks when equivalence is claimed;
• migration rehearsal, install, import and package checks;
• extension registration and startup;
• permission, egress, secret and hostile-input probes;
• license and notice review; and
• performance measurements only when performance is claimed.

Foreign tests establish foreign behavior. Generated tests cannot be the sole judge of generated code, and heuristic review cannot override a failed deterministic gate. A bounded correction loop ends verified or explicitly incomplete. Traces and failures may inform repair through their Memory, Shadow, Drift and consent owners.

The candidate-author Agent emits a Promotion Request, while owners decide and perform their own effects:

At effect time each revalidates candidate identity, current base, evidence, authority, and its own recovery. Merge cannot atomically make migration, restart, remote write, and publication. Failed or indeterminate effects remain attributed; the candidate-author Agent cannot erase them by deleting its workspace or changing its explanation.

Transmuter and correspondence

Cloud archives, historical conversations, and shared media expose an application ownership need outside Smith. Transmuter names that candidate study, with Extractor and Synthesizer as internal stages. It remains outside the accepted Portfolio until its records, judgment, finish, recovery, and independent use establish an accepted contract. The candidate-author Agent may propose a parser or supply attributable candidate artifacts for interpretation. Transmuter's proposals retain source lineage; Memory, Mirror, and Soulforge independently admit their own effects. Imported material establishes no Persona, instruction, preference, or training truth by itself. Assimilated capability and every learned Spell are private by default; A2A advertising, Legion distribution, or public packaging needs its own authorization.

Assimilation is not consumption: the candidate-author Agent breaks foreign pattern on the anvil of local law and offers a new organ. Purpose is the hammer. Pattern is the anvil. Consent is the seal. What leaves the Forge may ask to live; it does not crown itself.

Consequences

Acceptance gates

No automated Assimilation path may ship until hostile-source ingestion, candidate isolation, provenance retention, bounded execution, deterministic receipts, refusal after base changes, effect-time authorization, target-owned promotion, and recoverable or explicitly forward-only failure are proved.