The Architecture

The loop

Every cycle runs eight phases in order — HOUSEKEEPING → WAKE → ASSESS → PLAN → ACT → WRITE → FLUSH → COMMIT — each with its own budget and an activity log. The work happens in ACT: tools are dispatched in parallel within each round — shell, code_exec, web_fetch, web_search, mind_search (FTS5 over its own wiki), MCP peers, and sub-agents — with continuation-context carried across rounds. At COMMIT, state is written under a trust gate.

The three engines

Chimera's daily synthesis comes from three engines, and they are the chimera's three natures: Discovery (what it saw — patterns, themes, failure traps), Curiosity (what it chased — it picks a live question and researches it to a findings note), and Reflection (what it learned — a first-person look back, and one thing to do differently). Each is a Chronicle writer and a mutation proposer.

Cost discipline

Three orthogonal caps keep runaways from running away: per-cycle, rolling-60-minute, and per-task. Any one of them can hard-stop a cycle. A persistent escalation memory means a task that fails at one tier auto-promotes the next attempt's model — learning that costs nothing to re-derive.

The ladder, and the memory

Models route through a tier ladder — haiku → sonnet → opus — across Anthropic and OpenRouter, with a deliberate inversion: the opus tier defaults to a far cheaper open model and reserves the frontier for where it earns its price. Underneath sits a SQLite mind — entities, transitions, mutations, an activity log, and a full-text wiki — projected, optionally, into a Kuzu graph. Chimera searches itself before it searches the web.

The federation

And it is not alone. Over A2A (MCP), Chimera dispatches to peer nodes through a trust ladder that can ALLOW, DEGRADE, or REFUSE — the federation is where a single agent becomes a network.