Agent Lifecycle Kit

0004. Thin bootstrap, kit-knowledge chunks, and one MCP profile per session

Dumping philosophy, SOPs, skill bodies, and a stacked MCP catalog into every turn burns the context budget and makes EDD routing evals meaningless. Agents still need kit procedures and live tools. We needed a lasting split: what is always-on versus retrieved, and how many MCP servers compete for tool-schema tokens.

Context and Problem Statement

Dumping philosophy, SOPs, skill bodies, and a stacked MCP catalog into every turn burns the context budget and makes EDD routing evals meaningless. Agents still need kit procedures and live tools. We needed a lasting split: what is always-on versus retrieved, and how many MCP servers compete for tool-schema tokens.

Decision Drivers

  • Keep always-on bootstrap under ~2k tokens (kit measure-context)
  • Retrieve SOP / philosophy / handover slices instead of bulk file reads
  • Extra MCP tools compete for attention and inflate schemas
  • EDD (ADR 0003) only stays honest if always-on context stays thin

Considered Options

  • **Option A:** Eager-load CODING_PHILOSOPHY.md, SOPs, and stacked MCP profiles in every session
  • **Option B:** Thin AGENTS.md index; on-demand file read / **kit-knowledge** chunks; **one MCP profile** per session
  • **Option C:** No MCP; agents always Read whole kit files

Decision Outcome

Chosen option: "**Option B**", because invariants live in the thin handshake, procedure text is a retrieval problem, and profile composition is a session-scoped adapter choice. SOP: SOPs/context-budget.md. Catalog: mcps/README.md.

Consequences

  • Good, because default sessions stay lean (kit-knowledge, context7, github, memory) and skills declare mcp: ids
  • Bad, because agents must look up procedures instead of having full SOP text in every prompt
  • Follow-up: do not stack collab + devtools + ops into one global mcp.json

Architecture sketch

flowchart TB
  AlwaysOn[Always-on AGENTS.md index]
  Skill[Phase skill body on trigger]
  KitKnow[kit-knowledge MCP chunks]
  Memory[memory MCP durable facts]
  Profile[One MCP profile for the session]
  AlwaysOn --> Skill
  Skill --> KitKnow
  Skill --> Memory
  Skill --> Profile

Links