adr/adr-004-core-skills-separation

Adr/Adr 004 Core Skills Separation

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ADR-004 — Separate Zagros Core and Zagros Skills

Status: Accepted
Date: 2026-09-13

Context

Retrieval/storage infrastructure and agent behavior evolve at different rates and should not force a single versioning or trust boundary.

Decision

Maintain Zagros Core and Zagros Skills as separate but compatible layers. Core provides ingestion, storage, retrieval, CLI, MCP, and UI. Skills provide harness-neutral investigation behavior and evidence-handling guidance.

Consequences

Skills can evolve independently, work without one specific harness, and declare minimum Core compatibility. Core remains useful without a skill package.

Alternatives considered

Embedding all behavioral instructions into the MCP server was rejected because it couples agent policy to transport/runtime implementation and reduces portability.