An agentic session is high-entropy and ephemeral… a conversation, scratch files, several open worktrees, half-formed understanding. Almost none of it survives to the next session. germinate makes the machinery that keeps ephemeral sessions durable and mergeable the part you carry forward.
Append-only, OpenTelemetry-shaped JSONL that version-tracks understanding: trace, span, confidence, risk, evidence, status. Not the decision… the trace of how conviction moved.
A registry of every surface (canonical git SSOT plus advisory projections), each stamped with a docset version. A projection older than the header is stale by definition.
Coal to diamond compaction: a head with forward pickup pointers and a tail with provenance and lineage.
Git is the serializer for tracked files; this warns where advisory state escapes the lock. drift-check exits nonzero on drift, so it is a CI gate.
npm install -g germinatebrew install flashesofbrilliance/tap/germinateHomebrew binary is macOS-only; Linux installs via npm.
germinate makes the boundary between serialized (git-tracked) and advisory (everything else) state visible and enforceable… the same air-gap discipline ARCS runs on its own artifacts. It is one of the open, MIT-licensed public goods in the ARCS family: the tools are open; the ARCS intelligence that orchestrates them is private.