wyvern-agent

A minimalist, headless airframe for agent-to-agent coordinated sorties — the drake-swarm lessons, decomposed into small reusable crates on an open substrate.

Status: chartered (2026-06-04) — see docs/CHARTER.md

What this is

drake proved out an agentic swarm: a desk dispatches sorties to worker models, captures their patches, and a wing-commander arbiter grades the work. Those lessons are real, but they live in a private monolith (drake-foreman) that is too entrenched to evolve cleanly. Sibling agent newt-agent is thriving but carries a rich TUI; wyvern is the separate, deliberately light agent for one job — coordinated sorties.

wyvern-agent is the rewrite: the same flight-ops lessons, restated in the open.

What "lightweight" means here

Many small crates and a full persistent-actor lifecycle is not a contradiction with lightweight — it is what lightweight means here:

• Light ≠ few crates. Each crate is small, sharp, single-purpose, and independently useful; a consumer depends only on what it needs.
• Headless. No TUI, ever — a ratatui dependency is exactly the weight wyvern refuses. Wyvern is a CLI + libraries; rich dashboards belong to newt pilot.
• Reuse, don't rebuild. Stand on agent-mesh-bus, agent-bridle-core, and dogfooded newt worker processes; wyvern writes orchestration glue only.
• No vendor code. Pilots are chosen by capability + scorecard, never by provider; grep for provider names in non-test source returns zero.

Positioning in the Gilamonster constellation

• Supersedes the private drake swarm (no vendor pilots; the drake-arbiter vendor slots are obsolete).
• Dispatches local-model newt-agent instances as workers — dogfood, no third-party pilots.
• Rides agent-mesh for coordination/airspace (cryptographic, broker-less).
• Leashes workers through agent-bridle — capabilities enforced as Caveats, not ambient authority.

Build gates

The airframe flies early; persistence lands last.

• Crawl — charter + crate-map ADR + workspace scaffold; cargo check green.
• Walk — one TaskRequest over agent-mesh → one newt worker → one TaskReply → a single voter grades the patch.
• Run — three pilots compete; quorum reaches consensus; scorecard records it.
• Fly — the persistent-actor lifecycle (context/supervisor/mailbox/attach/ registry), multi-round refinement, splash policy.

Documentation

• docs/CHARTER.md — mission, roles, the seven tenets, the 12-crate map, the reuse contract, and the build gates.
• docs/decisions/ — ADRs (ADR-0001 persistent context, ADR-0002 crate map).
• docs/MIGRATION_BACKLOG.md — drake-era design docs feeding the rewrite (revise-don't-copy; go-public scrub before public).