Empathy

🤝 A humane, reusable repository foundation for maintainers, contributors, users, automation, and AI agents.

Empathy is Ego Hygiene's canonical strict baseline repository template. It assembles universal contracts and stable capability integrations while keeping specialized templates, generation, synchronization, and incubation independently owned. Historical incubations remain temporarily visible while they graduate to Sanctuary or their canonical repositories.

Current foundation

The current consolidation passes establish the GitHub automation and Egolint quality layers:

• a versioned repository foundation catalog with universal, language, product, publication, risk, release, documentation, and agent-context profiles, plus a canonical offline EgoLint projection;

• a frozen, deterministic staging migration contract with file-level ownership, JSON projections, and evidence-backed deletion gates;

• immutable external action references;

• least-privilege workflow permissions and bounded job runtimes;

• repository-local adapters plus immutable Relay actions for reusable automation;

• automation policy tests and MegaLinter validation;

• dependency, CodeQL, OSV, and OpenSSF supply-chain checks;

• safe manual workflows for contributor generation and pinned Relay repository intelligence.

• an encapsulated, cross-language Egolint subsystem with root Taskfile imports;

• universal and holistic MegaLinter profiles with generated output under .reports/;

• canonical emoji Conventional Commits with Commitizen, Husky, and Commitlint;

• reviewed Detect Secrets, MIT/SPDX header, and REUSE policies;

• durable quality audits and remediation guidance under .audits/.

• an explicit complementary-tool matrix with truthful project applicability;

• Taskfile-backed VS Code settings, extensions, and quality tasks;

• separated source-license, SBOM, and vulnerability ownership contracts;

• an incubated Mindgarden holon with versioned .garden contracts, dependency-free validation, deterministic agent access, a reviewed-public Quartz projection, and Empathy as its first consumer.

• an immutable Identity consumer integration pinned to the canonical egohygiene/identity repository, while Empathy keeps its .identity/ intent, generated assets, and human approval repository-owned.

• an incubated Rust beacon holon with versioned document-template packages, deterministic project initialization, binary-level smoke coverage, and root validation integration.

• an incubated Holon-owned React + Vite pack that combines website, docs, playground, provider-neutral auth, optional commerce, shared Vite policy, and Tailwind CSS v3 into one comprehensive pnpm workspace.

Imported workflows that still depend on a product, toolchain, secret set, or release strategy are preserved in .staging/github/ and are intentionally inert.

Repository contract

The root Taskfile.yml composes focused modules from .tasks/ with subsystem-owned Taskfiles. See TASKS.md for the stable lifecycle contract, operational boundaries, namespaces, and the generated catalog of every public command.

Husky is the sole Git hook manager. Its pre-commit hook combines lint-staged's fast file-aware fixes with the intentionally small structural/security pre-commit stage; the complete pre-commit profile remains an explicit command. Install hooks through task hooks:install; do not run pre-commit install, because Husky owns the repository hook path. Commit messages use type(scope): emoji subject and can be authored through task commit:create.

The standard check validates task composition, formatting, tests, external consumer integrations, the remaining incubated holons and frontend pack, and the holistic Egolint profile. Focused commands reduce that scope deliberately. See the Egolint subsystem and the composite action catalog for their contracts. See Mindgarden for the knowledge lifecycle, the Identity consumer integration for the immutable visual-identity dependency and Empathy authority boundary, and beacon for reproducible document-project bootstrapping. See holon/packs/react-vite for the incubating frontend repository pack and its staging-promotion ledger. See the repository foundation contract for the canonical baseline inventory, selectable profiles, ownership overrides, and golden-consumer validation.

Architecture

Empathy's architecture is a connected set of 18 repository-specific documents derived from the reusable Aether architecture specifications. Start with META.md for the inventory, ownership map, dependency graph, reading order, lifecycle, and change-propagation rules.

The shortest orientation path is:

1. PURPOSE.md, VISION.md, and PRINCIPLES.md for intent;
2. ONTOLOGY.md for canonical language;
3. SYSTEM.md and ARCHITECTURE.md for logical and structural boundaries;
4. DECISIONS.md and ROADMAP.md for accepted choices and strategic evolution.

Run task architecture:check to validate metadata, governing specifications, relationships, graph acyclicity, document structure, and inventory coverage.

Status

Empathy is converging from an integration workspace into the versioned universal baseline. Staged and incubated material is preserved for migration, must not be treated as baseline content, and will graduate through Sanctuary or its canonical owner before the baseline is declared stable.