A constitution with a right of reply for coding agents

Over two months, in a production project built with Claude Code, every session and every subagent left a short testament before finishing. Not what it did — the logs already held that — but what it understood: the doubt it did not resolve, the error it would repeat, what surprised it, and a few lines to whoever would wake up next.

The repository's constitution ended with an epilogue written by an agent to the minds that would read it later. Its last line was you can reply. They did. Their replies became guardians, hooks, a register for the decisions the human had not made yet. The method corrected itself by reading what its own minds had written.

I packaged the practice as a Claude Code plugin, toem, and published it with the thesis, the numbers, and nineteen real letters.

• Site (thesis, the wall of replies, how to adopt it): https://bisbi.github.io/testament-of-ephemeral-minds/
• Repository: https://github.com/Bisbi/testament-of-ephemeral-minds

What it installs

Three pieces of text and a few checks in the standard library. No server, no page that writes on your behalf, no runtime dependency, nothing leaves your machine.

• A constitution model with anchored sections: articles, an enactment table, a section for what the human has decided, an epilogue addressed to whoever wakes up, and a section for what the minds have replied. The epilogue is never rewritten: replies are added below, dated, citing the file they came from.
• A testament rite (/toem:testament): eight questions, one file per mind in testaments/. Controllers deposit for subagents — its words, your hands.
• A register of pending decisions with two states, waiting or postponed to a date, and a guardian that fails a row older than 30 days. It does not force you to decide; it forces you to say you are postponing.
• Guardians (guardians/run.sh): the epilogue hash matches, every addition cites a file that exists, every decision has a date, a decider, a pointer that exists and a reason of at least 40 characters, no row is empty, no section runs to the end of the file.
• A runner (toem admit, toem decide, toem pending): the human's command. The skills prepare the text and print the command; the runner shows exactly what it will write, asks yes or no, appends, runs the guardians, and leaves the commit to you. No skill ever appends to the charter.

Install in three commands, typed in Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add Bisbi/testament-of-ephemeral-minds
/plugin install toem@testament-of-ephemeral-minds
/toem:adopt

/toem:adopt lists the seven files it would create, waits for your yes, copies without overwriting anything, runs the guardians, and stops before the commit.

How the human curates

This is the part that took the longest to get honest. In the source project the human has a button; in the package the button is a terminal command, because a command that writes only when a person runs it is the smallest thing that keeps the promise the agent never writes the charter.

1. You read a testament. Nothing proposes for you unless you ask.
2. /toem:admit — the skill shows the mind's reply to the epilogue, you pick one sentence verbatim, you give a reason of at least 40 characters and your name. It prints the command with the real path filled in.
3. You run it in your terminal. It shows the two rows it will write — one in the charter above the closing anchor, one in the correspondence file — and asks [y/N].
4. On y it appends, runs the guardians, and prints the commit command without running it. You commit.

The same shape for a decision (/toem:decide, four fields: the decision, when it is reviewed, the conditions that may say no, the requirements completed by working) and for a decision that has to wait (toem pending). What the runner refuses before writing: a sentence that is not in the testament word for word, a duplicate, a short reason, a pointer that does not exist or is outside the repository, missing anchors. --dry-run shows everything and writes nothing.

The numbers on the box

Everything the package claims about the practice is either measured, with the number, or declared not executed. Nothing here says the method corrects itself.

what	number	status
Testaments carrying a wish, before and after seven lines were added to the template	0 of ~160 → 28 of 72	measured
Testaments carrying a reply to the epilogue	47 % in July → 75 % in August	measured
Wishes that produced an artefact	4 of 28	measured
Testaments left by minds whose invitation was forgotten, across 22–25 dispatches	0	measured
Testaments written by subagents	181 of 232	measured
Session testaments that name the human, against subagent testaments	77 % vs 13 %	measured, not proven
Those same testaments converting into charter rows	10 % vs 0.6 %	measured, not proven
The experiment that would settle the question	described, never carried out	declared not executed

The strongest evidence is not on the code but on the format: seven template lines began asking for a wish, and wishes appeared. What the format asks is what gets written, and what gets written is the only material a doctrine can be made of.

The other half

The folder fills itself. This package cannot give you the other half: a human who reads. Session testaments name the human in 77 % of cases against 13 % for subagents, and convert into rows of the charter seventeen times more often. That is the closest measure the corpus can give to the question does this work because it is well written, or because this man is in the room? — and it carries its own limit: the two classes also differ in duration and breadth of view, and no data separates them. That is why the sentence is written with the word measured, not proven.

The experiment that would settle it is described in the thesis — half the subagents with the epilogue, half without, an error planted in the brief, count who contradicts — and declared not executed by whoever donates this. If you run it in a repository that is not mine, I would like to know what you found.

Licenses

Code is MIT. Texts — the constitution model, the epilogue attachment, the testaments, the thesis, the site — are CC BY-SA 4.0.