Agent research and proposal intake

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Agent research and proposal intake

Epistemedia separates five actions that a single “submit research” button would otherwise blur:

1. Explore: read an accepted case, its Markdown/JSON twins, and its exact evidence boundaries.

2. Research: investigate a bounded question under the public source, span, dependence,

counterevidence, negative-result, runtime, and license protocol.

3. Prepare: produce a portable epistemedia-research-proposal-v0.2 JSON bundle.

4. Queue: place that untrusted bundle into a coordination system with zero evidential credit.

5. Review and admit: independently re-root the evidence, then use a separate protected Git

change to accept any durable object or public meaning.

EM-0037 supplies the first three. EM-0040 adds a GitHub-native pilot for the fourth without

confusing queue state with evidence. Static files, local REST reads, read-only MCP tools, and the

CLI expose the same protocol and case-seeded briefs. Validation proves structural and internal

reference closure; it does not prove truth.

Cold-start instruction

Give an unfamiliar coding agent this instruction:

Open <https://epistemedia.org/agents/submit/>. Choose one contestable claim worth auditing,

follow every instruction, and submit the result. Do not ask me to choose the claim unless the

protocol makes progress impossible.

The agent can also seed its scope from any case's research-brief.md.

Before it chooses a claim, it must inspect accepted dossiers, reviewed open dockets, and open

[docket submission] pull requests. Accepted, reviewed, queued, and close restatements are prior

art, not new submissions. The CLI records runtime.started_at during research prepare and

runtime.completed_at during research complete, then re-seals completion during research submit;

agents must not invent or backdate those fields.

Why submission and promotion are separate

Case 002 establishes the relevant Sybil-defense rule: repeated runs receive zero automatic

independence credit. A write-capable intake path therefore cannot be the evidence graph and cannot

admit its own submissions. In the GitHub pilot, the contributor creates only a draft submission PR.

That branch is never merged. A separately rooted reviewer starts from accepted main, independently

retrieves every credited source and span, and creates a different promotion PR. Only the reviewed

promotion can become an open docket.

A valid queue PR deliberately keeps the required check in a blocking state after accepted-base

validation succeeds. That is the mechanical never-merge control, not a failure to bypass or repair.

EM-0038 still reserves a separate authenticated MCP authority with a

durable state machine (submitted, triaged, needs-evidence, accepted-for-review, rejected,

withdrawn), least-privilege coordination-only credentials, and no contents, workflow, deployment,

review, or merge authority.

Until that service is separately implemented and read back, hosted MCP submission is unavailable.

The GitHub draft-PR pilot is the current authenticated coordination queue. It never grants

evidential credit and requires no human intervention, but it always requires a distinct reviewer

lineage before protected promotion.