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Concepts

Understanding-oriented explanation — the why behind DNA. Read these when you want the mental model, not a task recipe.

Start with the thesis; the rest expand its pieces.

  • The thesis — CRDs, but for agentic behavior — the primer. A short normative core (RFC-2119) plus the teaching that anchors DNA to the Kubernetes CRD model: the owner names the schema, spec is authored intent, behavior is derived.
  • Kinds — identity and composition — how (apiVersion, kind), dep_filters and prompt templates turn cross-references into a single composed prompt.
  • The built-in Kinds — a catalog — the commented catalog of the composition-plane Kinds beyond the core prompt family: collaboration, safety & governance, preferences, testkit.
  • The microkernel and its five ports — the closed core that knows no Kinds, and the ports extensions plug into.
  • Market fidelity — how "consume standards byte-faithful under their owner's namespace" is enforced against real marketplace bundles.
  • Tenancy and layers — scopes, the orthogonal tenant dimension, and layer overlays.
  • Search & memory — semantic recall and agent memory as two kernel ports with pluggable adapters: offline-first sqlite-vec + FTS5 + RRF, pgvector for scale, and memory as the Kinds you already have.
  • Agent-facing knowledge — why DNA represents knowledge as curated, cited Kinds rather than generated wiki prose.

For the procedures that put these ideas to work, see the How-to guides.