The Unwritten Manual
Loreto field paper No 03, November 2026. 21 pages for CIOs, CTOs and heads of platform, free to read. Why the knowledge that makes agent work mergeable is institutional and mostly unwritten, the study that found context files can cost more than they help, and a worked example on three.js that shows its own checks.
What it argues
The model is not the expensive part
Most enterprise AI arrives knowing everything about the world and nothing about the company it works for. The barrier is memory, not intelligence.
Your systems already wrote it down
Commits, reviews, reverts, tickets and runbooks record how a team actually works, as a side effect of doing the work.
More words is not more knowledge
Context files raised inference cost by over 20% without generally improving success. Overviews waste tokens; earned conventions do not.
Specific, earned, triggered, current
Four tests a rule has to pass before it goes in front of an agent, and five moves from exhaust to harness.
How to get it
Free. Signed-in Loreto accounts download it from the page; everyone else leaves an email address and it arrives by mail.