Cognition-OS/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Ground rules (please read)

This project defines OS-level governance and contracts for probabilistic computation. It is not an “AGI” repo and it does not place LLMs in kernel space.

Non-negotiables

• The control plane MUST be deterministic and auditable.
• Models/workers MUST NOT receive ambient authority.
• All tool execution MUST be capability-scoped and sandboxed.
• Policies MUST live outside model weights.
• Prefer small, composable primitives over monolithic designs.

What to contribute

• Design docs with concrete invariants and failure modes.
• Spec proposals for object model / syscalls (with versioning discipline).
• OS mapping notes (FreeBSD and Linux).
• Minimal prototypes that demonstrate enforcement boundaries.

What not to contribute (early)

• “Put the model in the kernel” proposals.
• Benchmark-driven complexity without a contract.
• Unscoped tool execution paths.

Spec change process

Specs in spec/ are treated as contracts:

• Breaking changes require an explicit note in the PR description.
• Prefer additive changes.
• Include an example flow in examples/ when adding new primitives.