README.md

Pattern catalog

Each pattern in patterns/ follows the same shape, so you can read one and know where to look in the next:

Section	What it answers
The problem	What goes wrong without this, concretely
The mechanism	What the system does differently. Not the benefit, the mechanism
The invariant	One thing that must hold, phrased so it can fail
What this does not do	The limits of that invariant, stated rather than implied
The test	What a suite has to cover for the invariant to mean anything
When not to use this	At least one situation where this is the wrong choice
What to measure	The signals that tell you whether it worked here
Reference implementations	Where this exists as running code, and what that code does not do

A pattern with no falsifiable invariant is advice. The pattern-proposal issue template says the same thing.

Patterns

Consolidated means the document lives in patterns/ and follows the template above. Standalone would mean a document still in its original form at its original path. There are none left: all four families are through the template.

Pattern	Family	Catalog state
Routing before reasoning	Decide what deserves computation	Consolidated
Grounded context	Constrain with structure	Consolidated
Silent execution	Silence and capability	Consolidated
Enforcement and evidence	Enforce and prove	Consolidated

Eleven earlier documents are now stubs pointing at the consolidated pattern that absorbed them, so links published before the merge still land somewhere useful:

Stub	Absorbed into
inference-trap.md, guardrail-router.md, compute-to-lookup-ratio.md	Routing before reasoning
multidimensional-knowledge-graphs.md, semantic-firewall.md, recursive-ontologies.md	Grounded context
headless-agent.md, silent-swarm.md, mute-agent.md	Silent execution
control-planes-vs-prompts.md, evidence-plane.md	Enforcement and evidence

Eleven documents totalling roughly 5,800 lines became four totalling roughly 3,800, with every unique implementation section retained. The reduction is the Overview, Benefits, Anti-Patterns, Conclusion, and Further Reading sections that each document repeated.

Three documents are not patterns and are not going into patterns/:

• The Cognitive Systems Architect, a role essay
• Agent Mesh Patterns, notes from two prototypes
• Production Deployment Guide, operational practice

Families

Decide what deserves computation. Classify the request before answering it, and enforce a budget on the expensive path.

Constrain with structure. Use a graph, not a similarity score, to decide what the model is allowed to see and allowed to claim, and rebuild that graph from the failures it produces.

Silence and capability. Give language to the boundary and capability to the workers, and never to the same component.

Enforce and prove. Put the rule where the model cannot argue with it, then emit evidence somebody else can check.

Which patterns have tests

Suite	Pins
tests/test_evidence_plane.py	A receipt fails verification when the claim, artifact, key, or decision changes
tests/test_routing_invariants.py	No request reaches the reasoning path while the budget is spent, and the retry hole that leaves
tests/test_silence_invariants.py	No component both reads free text and holds a capability
tests/test_grounding_invariants.py	The six firewall rules, and the two limits the pattern claims

Every consolidated pattern has a suite. That was not true before the catalog existed, and it is the reason the template puts The invariant above The test rather than after it.