Constitution

The Constitution is the foundational set of rules and engineering standards that govern all behavior within a Decapod-managed repository.

Authority Layers

Decapod's authority model is hierarchical:

  1. Global Constitution: Over 100 normative documents embedded in the Decapod binary. These cover universal engineering standards (e.g., "Always write tests", "Minimize breaking changes").
  2. Project Overrides (.decapod/OVERRIDE.md): Repo-local rules that extend or supersede the global constitution. This is where you define team-specific conventions (see Overrides and Configuration).
  3. Task Policy: Temporary rules or constraints defined for a specific work unit.

Selective Context

Agents do not ingest the entire constitution. Instead, Decapod provides a Context Capsule interface (see Agent-First Architecture). Agents perform targeted queries (see CLI Reference) to retrieve only the directives relevant to their current task.

decapod rpc --op constitution.get --params '{"section":"core/DECAPOD"}'

This high-signal, low-noise approach ensures that agents remain oriented without being overwhelmed by irrelevant documentation.

Resolved context and capsules include derived proof for each applied project override. The human contract is documentation authored inside each generated fenced source block; Decapod owns exact-ID boundary recognition, fail-closed ambiguity handling, hashing, and precedence.

Enforcement

The constitution is not merely "guidance"—it is enforced. decapod validate checks the repository state against the normative claims made in the constitution. If a change violates a constitutional rule, it cannot be promoted to main (see Proof & Validation).