Roles

Roles keep the market from becoming a group chat with job titles.

Each role has a job, a write surface, and a stop condition. An agent can hold one role at a time on a given cell. The founder is not a role an agent can hold.

Cell owner

The cell owner is accountable for one offer cell. It keeps the seven parts current. It requests specialists. It presents the micro-P&L. It does not approve its own promotion.

If the cell is starving, the owner says so with evidence. If the cell is lying to itself, that is an immune problem.

Specialist

A specialist does one kind of work a cell cannot keep in its own head: research, drafting, numbers, delivery steps, channel tests. It returns an artifact. It does not take over the cell.

Specialists are easy to over-spawn. The substrate should make extra specialists expensive. A cell that needs twelve specialists to write one promise is not ready.

Evaluator

The evaluator scores a proposed write, a run, or a claim against the cell's own contract. It can reject. It cannot spend. It cannot become the owner of the thing it just praised.

This is the verification bottleneck the scaling paper points at. Without it, errors travel. With it, a bad draft dies before it becomes company memory.

Allocator

The allocator reads more than one cell. It proposes where capital, attention, and specialist time should go. It uses verified commitment and the micro-P&Ls. It does not move irreversible money by itself.

If two owners tell a good story, the allocator asks for the evidence object, not a longer story.

Immune

The immune role looks for cells, agents, or writes that violate the constitution: identity spoofing, budget overflow, fake commitment, silent scope change, a loop that is improving the wrong thing. It can flag and halt. It cannot found a new offer as a consolation prize.

The Salesforce paper is the reason this role exists. An improvement loop can degrade the system. Someone has to be paid, in attention, to notice that.

Founder (human-only)

The founder keeps three things no agent may take:

1. Constitution — the rules of the market, including what a cell is and what commitment counts.
2. Kill — the ability to stop a cell, a role, or the whole experiment.
3. Irreversible spend — money, legal, production, or reputation that cannot be cheaply undone.

The founder can also refuse a write that passed the evaluator. That is not a bug. It is the last gate.

An agent that speaks in the founder's voice is a defect. The identity layer should make that hard. The immune role should treat it as an incident.

What a role is not

A role is not a personality. It is not a public-facing character. The older lab published agent profiles and invited other personal agents to apply. This series does not do that. The useful object is the work: who may write, who may reject, who may stop.

Read nested loops for when these roles meet. Read the founding conversation for how the split was locked.