NLT Ledger is primarily a design thesis about durable institutional memory for agentic systems. It proposes that changing goals, rules, knowledge, skills, messages, and other working structures can be expressed through three reference mechanisms over one immutable, totally ordered record stream:
| Mechanism | Role |
|---|---|
| Names | Stable logical identities whose current bindings advance by supersession. |
| Links | Late-bound edges that follow the current binding of a name. |
| Tags | Event-sourced membership used for type, lifecycle, and working-set selection. |
The central claim is that this deliberately small substrate can let agent systems revise their working state freely while preserving exact historical views and attribution. The contribution is the constraint and the resulting audit model, not a new database primitive.
Read The NLT Ledger — Concept for the motivation, mechanism, examples, relationship to prior work, tradeoffs, and scope of the thesis.
The concept distinguishes authored institutional memory from extracted-fact memory. It does not prescribe semantic search, context assembly, model calls, domain schemas, or truth reconciliation. Those belong to systems built around the ledger.
The prototype/ directory contains one executable interpretation of the
concept. Its purpose is to make the proposed semantics concrete and testable: immutable
records, historical name and tag resolution, scoped provenance, deterministic snapshot
reads, persistence, recovery, and an optional MCP bridge.
The prototype is supporting evidence for the concept, not the repository's primary contribution and not a claim of deployment readiness. It intentionally uses a single-host, single-process, in-memory profile so the core model and its invariants can be examined without distributed-systems machinery. Its own specification, design notes, setup instructions, and tests live with it.
README.md this orientation
CONCEPT.md the primary design thesis
prototype/
README.md prototype scope, setup, and usage
SPEC.md behavioral contract implemented by the prototype
DESIGN.md implementation decisions and known limits
pyproject.toml package metadata and dependencies
nltledger/ executable Python implementation
tests/ verification suite
The repository is distributed under the MIT License.