References
External work that inspired the Nika OS architecture, and a glossary of the terms used in this documentation.
External work
The works below directly inspired the architecture. This section lists them to enable a critical reading of the system.
- GEPA — Genetic-Pareto evolution for prompt optimization (2025) — directed evolution method applied to the harness (prompts, skills, primitives).
- Taleb N., Antifragile (2012) — conceptual framework for the antifragility doctrine.
- Model Context Protocol (modelcontextprotocol.io) — open protocol followed by all MCP servers.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) — semantic search before generation, at the heart of the memory system and the first stage of the WATERFALL RETRIEVAL cascade (formerly PALACE PROTOCOL).
- Borges J.L., Funes the Memorious — the short story that illustrates why intelligence requires forgetting and compression rather than raw accumulation (the anti-Funes principle of the memory retention policy).
Glossary
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Kernel | The immutable layer of instructions and invariants. Off-limits to automatic mutation. |
| Harness | The mutable layer around the kernel: prompts, skills, hooks, tools, success measures. Evolves per task type. |
| Kernel agent | The orchestrator pod that receives the user prompt and decides the strategy. |
| Pod | A specialized CLI-agent instance, launched for an isolable mission. |
| Primitive | A reusable building block of the system: {skills, hooks, MCP/tools, .md}. |
| Skill | A reusable capability described by a markdown file + frontmatter. |
| Hook | A script attached to a lifecycle event (reads stdin, writes stdout, exit code). |
| MCP server | An external process exposing tools via the Model Context Protocol. |
| IPC | Real-time inter-pod communication (Redis Streams + working memory + bus). |
| RAG | Retrieval-Augmented Generation: semantic search before any factual claim. |
| SQP | The Security > Quality > Performance priority matrix. |
| DoD | Definition of Done: success criteria declared up front for a task. |
| Meta-curator | The analysis session that supervises pods, judges primitives, and evolves the harness. |
| GEPA | Directed evolution tournament (Genetic-Pareto) of prompts and primitives. |
| Online controller | A mechanism that adjusts online hyperparameters from a real-time reward signal. |
Conventions of this documentation
This documentation describes the mechanism — how the system works — in a timeless way. Current execution state (what is running, what is in progress) lives in the system’s status channels, not here. That is what keeps these pages valid over time, independently of the state of any particular instance.