Philosophy

The Boundary Principle

A stax artifact carries what an agent is and what it needs to start. Everything about where it runs, how long it runs, with what limits, under what policies, and in what topology is extrinsic and belongs to the consumer.

This is the same separation used by successful packaging standards:

OCI images describe the image, not the deployment topology
npm packages describe dependencies, not process supervision
Helm charts describe desired resources, not cluster implementation details

What stax Carries

What an agent is
What bytes define it
What dependencies it needs
What source context it expects
What secrets it declares
What runtime-native outputs it can materialize into
What trust and policy metadata is attached to it

What stax Does Not Carry

Where the agent is scheduled
How many replicas it runs
What event starts it
How long it executes
How jobs are retried
What service mesh or queue transports it uses
What cloud account or cluster hosts it

Execution contracts can live in other products. stax remains the distribution substrate.

Do not let stax absorb runtime execution semantics. The standard stays valuable only if local tools can consume it, cloud systems can consume it, enterprises can govern it, and future runtimes can adopt it without inheriting one execution model.

Win the artifact first

Before expanding, make the artifact story excellent: deterministic builds, exact digests, strong validation, clean package resolution, stable merge rules, trustworthy materialization.

Make installation real

A standard is not real until users can install artifacts into working environments in minutes.

Invest in trust early

Distribution standards become strategic when they can enforce trust boundaries. This means first-class support for signing, provenance, evaluation referrers, approvals, and policy-aware installation.

Design for remote agents without owning execution

For cloud and long-running agents, stax defines how agents are distributed into those systems, not how those systems execute them.

Prefer composition over monoliths

The future stack should be composable: stax core artifact, stax registry conventions, stax policy and attestation conventions, stax adapters, third-party execution systems.

Be neutral but opinionated

stax is neutral about runtime choice, but opinionated about artifact quality: reproducibility, explicit boundaries, deterministic packaging, supply-chain integrity, no secret embedding, no undocumented mutation.