Where Allostatik sits

Run AI agents on real work for a while and three kinds of thing pile up. Skills that say how to do a task. A harness that runs the work. And underneath both, a record of who you are, what the project is, and what has already been decided.

Those are layers, and they are worth keeping apart. Capability is how to do a task, which is where pstack, Cursor's plugin of skills and engineering principles for agent work, lives. Execution is where the work runs, in Claude Code or Cursor or Cowork. Allostatik sits under both of those, in identity, domain and knowledge — who you are, what the project is, what it knows — plus the loop that keeps all three current. Those are the layers closest to the human. Learning pstack is what raised the question of where the line between them falls.

Allostatik is the relationship between you and AI, written down in a form both of you can read. The conversation disappears. What stays is the minutes and the agreements.

Transcripts are not the same thing. pstack remembers through transcripts, which record everything and decide nothing. A decisions file records the conclusion and nothing else. Ten days of running the two side by side showed the difference more than once. A session explained in chat why it had skipped a step, and the explanation went when the session went.

The distinctive part is that the files are written for two readers at once. Most AI configuration is written for the model — a CLAUDE.md, a rules file, a skill, all of pstack. Most project documents are written for people — a README, a design record. These are read and written by both, and the routines are protocol for keeping the two readers in sync. The open states the goal in plain words and waits for your approval. The close writes each observation as one plain sentence. Handoffs are written for you first. Two words, checkpoint and side note, put something into the record mid-session.

Two things that claim less than it sounds.

The place is not unique — the stance is. Everyone is converging on the human end. Claude files things about you in the background. Projects hold documents a team shares. pstack's automate-me reads your past agent conversations and writes a mode file describing how you work. What is different here is that it is deliberate rather than automatic. You approve what goes in, the record is readable by you as well as by the model, and nothing lands without your yes.

And a lot of what Allostatik contains is not at the human end at all. Ledger formats, stamp integrity, drift-check surfaces, the upgrade contract, index scripts — that is machinery. The same ten days showed machinery pulling effort away from where the value is, with most of the stretch going into plumbing. So every piece of machinery has to name the human-facing thing that breaks without it. That is the rule the project states for any new abstraction, turned on the project itself. Anything that cannot pass it is weight.