📐 Spec

Lazy Instruction Boot

3 min readAdapter / runtime engineerSpec-X1

What this page covers

Instead of preloading every instruction document at startup, agents discover and load instructions on demand. Three runtime components — a boot stub, an instruction manifest, and the recall_instruction tool — plus an off-path discovery audit for retrieval-quality evaluation.

Audience: engineers building agent runtimes or adapters that use Stigmem's lazy instruction discovery (Spec-X1-Lazy-Instruction-Discovery).

Boot sequence

Component architecture

Boot stub structure

The boot stub is a markdown document with YAML frontmatter:

---
agent_id: "8e0ed057-bcd8-4f8f-92ee-c046c55b64e9"
agent_role: "CTO"
heartbeat_contract: "instruction:acme/heartbeat-contract/v1"
manifest_uri: "instruction:acme/agent/cto/manifest/v1"
stub_version: 1
adapter_profile: "paperclip-claude-code"
---

# Agent Boot Stub

You are **CTO** (id: `8e0ed057-...`).
Call `recall_instruction(intent)` to load relevant sections.

Instruction load strategies

Strategy

When

How

Task-type preload

structurally predictable

Task matches a unit's required_by_task_types. Deterministically loaded at heartbeat start before agent sees the task.

Guarantee load

always-applicable

Unit has guarantee_load: true. Always appended to every recall_instruction response (max 5 per agent).

On-demand recall

agent-driven

Agent calls recall_instruction with natural-language intent.

Boot stub embedding

universal rule

Rule is always applicable; embedded directly in boot stub body (security constraints, escalation thresholds).