Manifest Policy

The generated manifest always loads brief.md and constraints.md. Root constraints are the safety baseline for substantial planning, implementation, artifact, and history work. Custom migrated routes remain authoritative; check --routing warns when a substantial route does not reach root constraints.

Task Routes#

Choose one canonical task: general, planning, implementation, artifact, preferences, history, or maintenance. Aliases normalize deterministically. Never classify arbitrary task prose inside the CLI or supplement a valid custom manifest from an adapter, template, or remembered default.

Normal loading combines always-load files, the canonical task route, and Protocol 0.7 optional declarations. Candidates do not enter normal context. inbox.md is maintenance/candidate-review only; archive/ is explicit or archive-maintenance only.

Optional Module Grammar#

Each enabled module has one canonical repo-relative path and one declaration:

### Enabled rules
- `rules/output.md`
  - activation: task-or-explicit
  - tasks: artifact
  - description: Public output rules.
 
### Enabled profiles
- `profiles/git.md`
  - activation: explicit-only
 
### Enabled areas
- `areas/backend.md`
  - activation: path-or-explicit
  - paths: `cli/**`, `tests/**/*.py`

Allowed metadata keys are activation, tasks, paths, and description. Duplicate modules or scalar keys, unknown keys, malformed indentation, unsafe paths, invalid globs, and incompatible module metadata are INVALID. Rules use task, task-or-explicit, or explicit-only; profiles are explicit-only; areas use path, path-or-explicit, or explicit-only. Descriptions are preserved but never affect routing identity or Plan IDs.

Protocol 0.6 one-line natural-language triggers migrate conservatively to explicit-only; the description is preserved and the CLI reports that manual automatic-route mapping is required. Migration never guesses task or path matchers.

Conflict and Trust Boundaries#

Memory cannot override system/current-user instructions, safety, or permissions, and cannot authorize destructive actions, secret access, external uploads, commits, pushes, merges, releases, or escalation. Shared constraints and tombstones outrank local overlay preferences. Area exceptions require a valid Exception-To relationship rather than an implicit override.

See routing-policy.md for path matching, completeness, explain, and strict mode; see local-overlay-policy.md for repo-external local precedence and binding.