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Architecture Level 10

Central Gate Architecture

The v1.6.3 architectural paradigm that shifts context discovery from unconstrained filesystem globbing to strict, field-gated loading via project.md. Introduces Path Resolution Convention.

Central Gate Architecture (v1.6.3)

Introduced in v1.6.3, the Central Gate is a major architectural paradigm shift that establishes project.md as the single source of truth for all workflow context loading, eliminating unconstrained filesystem probing (globbing).

🔒 The Problem with Filesystem Probing

In v1.6.1, the agent discovered Strategy and Roadmap documents by probing the filesystem (docs/strategy/ directories or plans/*-roadmap.md globs). As workspaces and contexts scale, this approach causes three critical issues:

  1. Unpredictability: Globs can accidentally pick up unrelated files, exceeding token limits.
  2. Brittle Architectures: Renaming a file breaks context loading unless workflows implement complex regexes.
  3. Ghost Loading: Features trigger passively without explicit developer intent, causing obscure side effects.

🗝️ The Central Gate Paradigm

Central Gate solves this by making feature detection strictly field-gated. Workflows are no longer permitted to blindly probe directories for context.

Instead, all context loading goes through the “Central Gate”: project.md.

If a feature (like a Strategy or Roadmap) is active, it must be declared via a field in the project contract.

Advantages

  • Explicit Intent: Agents only load what the user explicitly configures.
  • Extreme Speed: O(1) direct file reads instead of O(N) recursive globbing.
  • Cross-Project Capability: By declaring paths explicitly, features can share context across different projects seamlessly.

🌐 Path Resolution Convention

With Central Gate, PARA workflows now support the unified Path Resolution Convention for all contextual fields (strategy, roadmap, active_plan).

Standard Resolution

When no prefix is used, the workflow resolves the path relative to the current project’s root:

# project.md
strategy: "docs/strategy/frontend-strategy.md"

Resolves to: Projects/[current-project]/docs/strategy/frontend-strategy.md

Ecosystem Resolution (@ Prefix)

For Ecosystem projects, Central Gate introduces the @ prefix to securely resolve paths across project boundaries:

# project.md (in a satellite project)
strategy: "@my-ecosystem/docs/strategy/master-strategy.md"

Resolves to: Projects/my-ecosystem/docs/strategy/master-strategy.md

This allows an entire suite of satellite projects to securely load the exact same master Strategy or Roadmap document with zero token waste.

🛡️ Implementation in Workflows

  • /open: Steps 2 and 5.5 use field-gated loading for Strategy and Roadmap context. Replaces filesystem probes.
  • /plan: Context loading, Plan Type Selection, and Auto-updating now rigidly interact with project.md fields.
  • /docs: Automatically updates the strategy field in project.md whenever a new strategy document is initialized.
  • /end: Uses field-gated files instead of globs to accurately monitor the active strategy and roadmap files for SYNC.md propagation.

Added in v1.6.3.

→ Learn: Ecosystem Architecture → Learn: Strategy → Plan Flow → Learn: Unified Agent Index