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Genesis Genesis

External corpus

Genesis grounds itself in three external sources. Each is authoritative for a NARROW surface. Knowing the boundary is the difference between citing them correctly and committing the AUTHORITY OVERREACH anti-pattern named in C6 EXTERNAL CORPUS GROUNDING.

APM (microsoft/apm)

Section titled “APM (microsoft/apm)”

Repository: github.com/microsoft/apm

What it is: Agent Package Manager. A package manager for agent primitives — skills, agents, instructions, gh-aw workflows — under a .apm/ directory in any repo. Provides an install / init / run lifecycle, a manifest format, a lockfile, dependency resolution, and authentication for fetching primitives from public + private remotes (GitHub, ADO).

Authoritative for:

  • The dependency / lockfile schema for agent primitives.
  • The install / init / run command surface.
  • The marketplace / package addressing format.
  • Integration with gh-aw workflows.

NOT authoritative for:

  • The DESIGN of an individual primitive (skill structure, persona scoping, rule layout) — that is the genesis catalogue’s surface.
  • The runtime topology of multi-thread agent work — that is the Tier-3 architectural patterns surface.

How it composes with genesis: APM ships agent primitives that genesis-designed packages would publish. A genesis design produces a primitive plan; APM is one shipping target for the result. Genesis-shaped output is APM-publishable but not APM-specific.

agentskills.io

Section titled “agentskills.io”

Site: agentskills.io

What it is: Industry-standard convention for the SKILL.md container surface across multiple harness vendors. Defines the frontmatter shape (name, description, model, tools), body budget guidance, layout conventions, scripts directory conventions, and evals patterns.

Authoritative for:

  • The SKILL.md container surface (frontmatter, body budget, layout, scripts conventions, evals).
  • Harness-portable conventions for the SKILL primitive.

NOT authoritative for (this is the bounded-scope sub-rule of C6, applied):

  • The genesis primitive taxonomy (genesis names six primitives — persona scoping file, module entrypoint, scope-attached rule file, child-thread spawn, trigger orchestrator, plan persistence — of which SKILL is one realization of MODULE ENTRYPOINT).
  • The architectural (Tier-3) and design (Tier-2) pattern catalogues.
  • The refactor (Tier-4) discipline.

How it composes with genesis: A genesis-designed MODULE ENTRYPOINT, when realized as a SKILL.md, follows the agentskills.io container surface. Genesis owns the “is this one primitive or N? what shape does the work need?” decisions; agentskills.io owns the “what does the SKILL.md file look like?” decisions. The two compose; neither subsumes the other.

If a genesis design ships a MODULE ENTRYPOINT, it MUST conform to the agentskills.io container surface. If a SKILL.md has been authored without a genesis design, it has skipped the architecture step — that is a smell, not a contradiction.

Agentic SDLC Handbook

Section titled “Agentic SDLC Handbook”

Site: danielmeppiel.github.io/agentic-sdlc-handbook

What it is: A long-form companion book covering the Agentic SDLC: how teams plan, build, review, ship, and maintain software whose work is increasingly performed by LLM-driven agents. Where genesis is a tactical skill (one architect, one design, one capability), the handbook is the strategic complement (how the practice scales across teams, programs, and time).

Authoritative for:

  • The full theory of LLM context engineering, attention decay, multi-agent orchestration, and why the Tier-2 patterns work the way they do.
  • Anti-pattern catalogues at scale (program-level, not just primitive-level).
  • The lifecycle of agent-authored artifacts (review, evaluation, observability, maintenance).
  • The vendor / harness landscape and the tradeoffs between them.

NOT authoritative for:

  • The exact mechanical procedure of a single design session (genesis owns that — the eight-step process in SKILL.md).
  • The exact pattern names and verbatim WHEN clauses (genesis is the canonical name registry; the handbook explains the patterns at greater depth and refers to the genesis names).

How it composes with genesis:

  • Genesis is the tactical skill: load SKILL.md, apply the eight-step process, produce a design.
  • The handbook is the strategic companion: read once for theory, dip in for chapter-level deep dives.

Recommended chapters for genesis users:

How to cite an external source correctly

Section titled “How to cite an external source correctly”

Every external grounding declaration in a genesis design MUST state explicitly what the corpus is authoritative FOR. Examples of correct citations:

  • “Per agentskills.io’s frontmatter convention, the description field is a function signature and not marketing copy.”
  • “Per APM’s lockfile schema, the package address pins both source and integrity hash.”
  • “Per the Agentic SDLC Handbook, Chapter 11, attention decays over distance, motivating B8 ATTENTION ANCHOR.”

Examples of AUTHORITY OVERREACH (incorrect):

  • “Per agentskills.io, the architecture should fan out into N personas.” (agentskills.io does not own architecture.)
  • “Per APM, this primitive should compose with B1.” (APM does not own pattern selection.)
  • “Per the Agentic SDLC Handbook, the SKILL.md frontmatter must include model: claude-sonnet-4.” (the handbook does not own the SKILL container surface.)

When in doubt, name the surface and cite the boundary.