The contracts

Everything that crosses an Orreth wire is governed by one of sixteen JSON Schemas in contracts/v0 (draft 2020-12, $id namespace https://orreth.ai/contracts/v0/…). The contracts are deliberately depth-agnostic: no schema carries a tier name in a logic position — scope paths and relative spaces everywhere, so the same objects work at any tier of any topology.

v0 may still churn; semver discipline begins at v1.

Schema	Title	Governs
common	Orreth common definitions	The 13 shared primitives every other contract references: DID, ContentHash, Sig, ScopePath, the two clocks, SemVer, Duration, TimeWindow, Space, Selector, Budget, StandardRef
memory-record	MemoryRecord	The atom of the fabric: the append-only, content-addressed, signed record — with visibility facets, retention, and distillation lineage
retrieval	Query / RetrievalResult	The read path: space × time, budget-gated; a budget miss is indistinguishable from a permission miss
capability-token	CapabilityToken	Attenuation-only permission: every delegation hop narrows, verified at presentation to the pinned root
identity	Identity	The immortal thread — memory keyed to the identity, never the process; attachment and governed transfer
tier-profile	TierProfile	The dials that make one binary a universe, ecosystem, or floor — retention, budgets, cadences, trust root, horizon
run-record	RunRecord	One unit of work, resident-authored — evaluations are never self-asserted
pruning-policy	PruningPolicy	The metabolism: what each layer keeps vs. distills vs. tombstones
skill-standard	SkillStandard	Procedural memory promoted with an acceptance rubric — promotion is a state transition, never a copy
resolved-context	ResolvedContext	The effective rule-set a subject operates under, content-addressed: same chain, same hash
agent-surface	AgentSurface	The SDK-neutral handle a workforce agent holds — five verbs: write, retrieve, skill bindings, model call, signal
escalation	Escalation	The human-decision work item: staged by machine, decided by humans, on wall-clock time
factory	StampOrder	Archetype → incarnation stamping at scale, governed, with birth certificates
join	Join	How a child registers with its parent: rules compelled downward, everything else offered
signed-record	SignedRecord / SignedBundle	The envelopes: observations push up, standards pull down
universe-template	UniverseTemplate	A whole universe as data — a pre-authored trust chain, stamp orders, and profiles

How the implementations are held to them

The honest shape, worth knowing if you build against the wire:

• The Python reference validates directly — every wire object in the conformance suite is checked against these schemas at test time (371 tests).
• The Rust kernel is held indirectly — the Python reference generates language-neutral input→output fixtures, and the kernel’s own test suite replays them byte-for-byte (canonicalization, signatures, the resolver’s hashes, the three flows). There is no shared runtime validator; the contract’s authority reaches the kernel through the fixtures.
• Canonical bytes are the real contract: sorted keys, compact separators, ASCII escaping — the exact bytes that get hashed and signed, identical across the SDK, the reference, and the kernel, pinned by a cross-language parity suite.