passepartout/docs/ARCHITECTURE.org

Passepartout Architecture

• The Four Quadrants
• Code Map
  • Core pipeline (loaded by ASDF, committed to git)
  • Skills (loaded at runtime by the skill engine)
• Pipeline Flow
  • Depth limiting
• Skill Lifecycle
• Communication protocol Format
  • Standard message envelope:

The Four Quadrants

Passepartout divides cognition along two axes: Foreground vs Background (initiated by the user vs running autonomously) and Probabilistic vs Deterministic (LLM-driven vs pure Lisp logic).

	Probabilistic (LLM)	Deterministic (Lisp)
Foreground	Chat responses, task execution, code generation	Shell execution, file I/O, safety gates, dispatcher checks
Background	Scribe distillation, vector embedding, autonomous decisions	Heartbeat, cron jobs, memory auto-save, gateway polling

The Probabilistic engine proposes. The Deterministic engine verifies and executes. No proposal from the LLM touches a file, runs a command, or sends a message without passing through at least one deterministic gate.

Code Map

The project is organized into org/ (source of truth) and lisp/ (generated by tangle).

Core pipeline (loaded by ASDF, committed to git)

File	Purpose
org/core-defpackage.org	Package definition and export list
org/core-skills.org	Skill engine: defskill macro, topological sorter, jailed loading
org/core-communication.org	Framed TCP protocol, actuator registry, daemon server
org/core-memory.org	memory-object struct, Merkle hashing, snapshots, persistence
org/core-context.org	Foveal-peripheral rendering, context assembly for LLM
org/core-loop-perceive.org	Stage 1: normalize raw signals into pipeline format
org/core-loop-reason.org	Stage 2: LLM proposal + deterministic verification
org/core-loop-act.org	Stage 3: dispatch approved actions to actuators
org/core-loop.org	Orchestration: process-signal, heartbeat, main entry point
org/system-diagnostics.org	Boot-time health check, doctor CLI

Skills (loaded at runtime by the skill engine)

Category	Files	Purpose
gateway-	gateway-cli, gateway-messaging, gateway-tui	External communication channels
system-model-	system-model-provider, system-model, system-model-router, system-model-embedding, system-model-explorer	LLM infrastructure
security-	security-dispatcher, security-policy, security-permissions, security-vault, security-validator	Safety and authorization
programming-	programming-lisp, programming-org, programming-standards, programming-literate, programming-repl	Lisp and Org tooling
system-	system-config, system-archivist, system-self-improve, system-memory, system-actuator-shell, system-event-orchestrator	Background services

Pipeline Flow

Every signal moves through three stages:

``` Signal → Perceive (normalize) → Reason (think + verify) → Act (dispatch) ```

The signal is a plist: (:TYPE :EVENT :META (...) :PAYLOAD (:SENSOR :user-input :TEXT "..."))

1. Perceive normalizes raw input from any gateway into a uniform signal
2. Reason calls the LLM to generate a proposal, then runs the proposal through all registered deterministic gates (sorted by priority). If a gate rejects the proposal, the rejection trace feeds back to the LLM for self-correction (up to 3 retries)
3. Act dispatches the approved action to the registered actuator (:cli, :tool, :system, :shell, :telegram, :signal)

Each stage can produce feedback signals that loop back to Perceive (e.g., a tool-execute action produces a :tool-output event that becomes the next perception).

Depth limiting

A depth counter prevents infinite loops. If a signal's depth exceeds 10, it is silently dropped. This is the circuit breaker for runaway recursive cycles.

Skill Lifecycle

1. Discovery: skill-initialize-all scans the skills directory, globs for *.lisp files (excluding core-* files which are loaded by ASDF)
2. Sorting: skill-topological-sort orders skills by their #+DEPENDS_ON: declarations
3. Loading: Each skill is loaded into a jailed package (passepartout.skills.<skill-name>). The loader removes in-package forms, evaluates the remaining code in the jailed package, and exports symbols matching the skill's short name to passepartout
4. Registration The skill's defskill call creates a skill struct in *skill-registry*, registering its trigger function, probabilistic prompt generator, deterministic gate, and system-prompt augment
5. Triggering: On each cognitive cycle, skill-triggered-find iterates the registry and returns the highest-priority skill whose trigger matches the context
6. Hot-reload: A skill can be replaced at runtime by loading a new version into its jailed package — no restart needed

Communication protocol Format

All communication between the daemon and its gateways (TUI, CLI, Emacs) uses length-prefixed plists over TCP:

``` 00002C(:TYPE :EVENT :PAYLOAD (:ACTION :handshake :VERSION "0.2.0")) ```

The 6-character hex prefix encodes the payload length. The payload is a prin1-serialized plist. *read-eval* is bound to nil on the receiving end to prevent code injection.

Standard message envelope:

Key	Value	Meaning
:TYPE	:REQUEST, :EVENT, :RESPONSE, :LOG, :STATUS	Message category
:META	plist	:SOURCE, :SESSION-ID, :reply-stream
:PAYLOAD	plist	Action-specific data (:SENSOR, :ACTION, :TEXT)
:DEPTH	integer	Recursion counter for loop prevention