design-patterns.md

Design patterns

Reasoning patterns (ReAct, chain-of-thought, plan/execute, tree-of-thoughts, and others) are runtime plugins registered in mas-library-standard and selected from agent manifests or overlays (kind: Overlay).

Enable via overlay

apiVersion: mas/v1
kind: Overlay
metadata:
  name: react
spec:
  patch:
    design_pattern:
      type: react

See library-samples/overlays/ for working examples.

Plugin implementations

Design-pattern plugins live under runtime/src/mas/runtime/machines/design_pattern/plugins/ (react.py, cot.py, plan_execute.py, tree_of_thoughts.py, …). Each implements the Mealy design-pattern contract and composes with governance and observability on the kernel envelope path.

Integration tests: runtime/tests/integration/test_design_pattern_plugins_integration.py.

Formal model

The design-pattern automaton (M_{dp}) is one factor in the runtime product. See automaton-product-model.md and See automaton-product-model.md.

Tutorials

• Building an agent
• Creating a MAS

Related

• production-path.md — supported execution path
• plugin-and-tool-authoring.md — writing plugins
• contracts-reference.md — contract families