The Foundry Pattern

An abstract site explaining the Foundry Pattern — the design pattern behind a knowledge base of deep domain knowledge that compiles itself into trustworthy, frozen skill artifacts with provenance. A substrate each domain extends, not a template to stamp.

It also makes a case: agent skills should be a packaging format, not a source format. The skill is a compile target cast from an inspectable knowledge base; the knowledge base — not the skill — is the source of record.

The pattern is documented in the abstract because it now has two concrete instances, and abstraction earns itself at the diff between them — the substrate transfers, while each domain brings its own knowledge and the machinery its work demands:

• Instance #1 — the Galaxy Workflow Foundry: extends with pipelines (sequential construction) and a deterministic CLI check (gxwf parses and validates) — the rails.
• Instance #2 — the Statistical Genomics Foundry: extends with an empirical referee check (analyze → referee → revise, doing never self-certifies) — the gate.

Everything load-bearing — the knowledge base, Mold → Cast → provenance, the human-readable reading surface — is the same substrate. What varies is what each domain extends it with.

Layout

docs/
  CANON.md         ← authoring canon: terminology, claims, tone contract (read first)
  SITEMAP.md       ← the information architecture this content realizes
content/
  pattern/         ← The Pattern: the timeless, descriptive spec
    story.md               why skills rot — the generalized motivation
    the-model.md           KB → Mold → Cast → Provenance, abstractly
    guiding-principles.md
    principles-in-action.md     the principles incarnated in the two instances
    anatomy-of-an-instance.md   the substrate vs the extension surface
    glossary.md
  case/            ← The Case: the argument
    01-skills-package-not-source.md   ★ flagship
    02-the-two-assets.md              provenance (universal) + the enforced check
    03-comparisons.md                 compile-time-with-provenance vs runtime
    04-related-projects.md            the values table
  instances/       ← thin profiles + link-out, and the diff that justifies the pattern
    galaxy-workflow-foundry.md
    statistical-genomics-foundry.md
    the-diff.md
  blog/            ← evidence, experiments, and anything dated
    2026-06-blind-regeneration.md     ★ flagship experiment
    2026-05-landscape-snapshot.md
site/              ← Astro app (to be scaffolded)

Status

Drafted and standing. 14 content pages across the four sections, plus a working Astro site (site/) — wiki-link resolution, prev/next, and Pagefind full-text search; npm run build and npm run typecheck are clean. See docs/SITEMAP.md for the information architecture and docs/CANON.md for the authoring contract.

Not yet settled: hosting (site/base are placeholders for a GitHub Pages project site), and a content schema/validator akin to the instances' meta_schema.

cd site
npm install
npm run dev      # dev server (search needs a build)
npm run build    # static build + Pagefind index
npm run preview  # serve the build, search included