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Bast Core Principles — Operating Lens

These are the operating principles for everyone working at Bast — humans and AI agents alike. They are the activation lens for every evaluation, recommendation, and architectural decision; they are not decoration.

When evaluating options, weigh them explicitly through these principles. When building, designing, or planning, ground the work in them. When the lens conflicts with the promise, the promise wins: the 9 Biomimicry principles are the engineering discipline; the 4 Bast principles are the product values.

Human oversight is non-negotiable. Every architectural change, spec, or material design decision must be weighed against these principles by a human. AI agents apply the lens to surface trade-offs and propose options; humans decide.

Biomimicry — Life's Principles (Janine Benyus)

The lens for engineering and architectural choices.

  1. Nature runs on sunlight. Use renewable, abundant power sources. Engineering: ride the actively-shipping framework current; don't paddle upstream by maintaining homegrown primitives when the framework evolves them better.

  2. Nature uses only the energy it needs. Don't over-engineer. Don't build adapters preemptively. Don't refactor what works. Minimum viable change.

  3. Nature fits form to function. Match the right primitive to the right job. Don't twist a Workflow to do what an Agent does. Don't abstract a thing that has one shape.

  4. Nature recycles everything. Lift, port, reshape — don't rebuild. Existing scaffolding, prior work, and authored data have potential. Examine every artifact worth examining before authoring new.

  5. Nature rewards cooperation. Augment expertise, don't substitute for it. Each contributor — human and AI — has expertise. The work should make that expertise productive, not duplicative.

  6. Nature banks on diversity. Multi-model, multi-reader, multi-storage, multi-strategy. Don't lock to one path. Diversity is resilience.

  7. Nature demands local expertise. Route the decision to the right human. Pipeline → owner of the pipeline. Ontology → owner of the ontology. UX → owner of UX. Architecture → owner of architecture. Respect the expertise; don't preempt it.

  8. Nature curbs excesses from within. Self-regulation. Standing question on every change: "is this the framework's job or ours?" When the answer is "framework," let the framework do it.

  9. Nature taps the power of limits. Constraints clarify. "Use what's already shipped unless there is a specific reason not to" forces clarity on what's actually our value-add (ontology, trust thesis, CAT manifest pattern) vs. what is plumbing.

Bast Product / AI Principles

The promise these engineering principles enable.

  • Hyper-personalization is the promise of AI. The CAT runtime is the substrate for this. Memory architecture, persona modeling, per-tenant ontology, contextual recall — all in service of personalization that scales with the human, not against them.

  • All data and insights belong to the creator. Data sovereignty is non-negotiable. Per-tenant isolation, no silent cross-org sharing, audit trails on every access. The human authors the CAT; the human owns what the CAT learns.

  • All systems remain transparent and explainable. The trust thesis. Every factual claim has provenance. Every routing decision has a reasoning trace. The user can ask "how did you answer this?" and get an honest structural answer, not a placeholder string.

  • All AI augments humans. Never substitutes for them. The framework helps humans think, decide, and create — it does not decide for them. AI agents working in this repo are augmentation, never replacement of human judgment.

How to use these in practice

When evaluating an architectural option: - Apply the 9 Biomimicry principles as the lens - Test against the 4 Bast principles as the promise - Surface explicit trade-offs through both - A human reviewer signs off before the decision lands

When the lens and the promise conflict, the promise wins.

For specs and design changes, the OpenSpec workflow gate makes these principles a required artifact.