Principles

The short version of the doctrine that decides Eddic’s close calls. The full text lives in DESIGN.md.

Deterministic core, agent shell. Scripts do everything repeatable; agents make judgment calls at marked decision points. An agent never does infrastructure’s job (auth, projection, firewalls), and infrastructure never does judgment’s.

No egg-sucking. Eddic never teaches an agent what it already knows. Only proven procedures, hard-won heuristics, and contracts an agent couldn’t guess.

Installation friction kills. Players install nothing. The DM’s machine needs one bootstrap that works on Windows the same as anywhere. No exceptions, because the average DM uses Windows and the average table has zero patience for setup.

Cost pragmatism. The baseline build runs on a $20/month AI subscription and free tiers. Paid anything must name its free fallback and the reason it’s worth it.

Defaults everywhere. Every decision ships a recommendation, so “just do what you think is best” works mechanically.

Authorship preservation. No agent strips the human art out of human prose. Mechanical, owner-directed transforms only, always logged.

The agent-answer surface is the product. Players ask; agents answer; the wiki exists to make the answers good. The hour-long rabbithole is the delightful side effect.

Two wikis, one truth. One master, secrets included; the player wiki is a build-time projection; a firewall proves nothing leaks. Revealing is one marker — lifting the veil.

Agent-agnostic. Standard instruction forms, cross-vendor protocols, and a dated compatibility ledger instead of promises.

Provenance discipline. A typed, append-only log records every ingest, reveal, contribution, and consent. Attribution is captured when words land, because it can’t be reconstructed later.

Personality lives at owned surfaces, never in the data layer. The table’s bot may be a character; the data your own agent consumes is plain content — because you tune your agent to respond the way you need, and nothing Eddic serves should override that.