{
  "$schema": "https://agentsfirst.dev/schemas/principles.v0.json",
  "framework": "Agents First",
  "version": "0.7",
  "framework_url": "https://agentsfirst.dev",
  "updated": "2026-05-10",
  "principles": [
    {
      "slug": "interface-first",
      "number": 1,
      "name": "Interface First",
      "summary": "Design the agent interface before any human UI. Tool definitions are the first artifact of every feature — regardless of whether you ship them as MCP, CLI, SDK, or function specs.",
      "url": "https://agentsfirst.dev/principles/interface-first/",
      "category": "new",
      "anti_patterns_defended": ["lazy-wrapper", "invisible-product", "god-server"]
    },
    {
      "slug": "contract-first",
      "number": 2,
      "name": "Contract First",
      "summary": "Write usage rules — permissions, constraints, sequences, formatting — before implementation. Without them, agents hallucinate identifiers and violate constraints.",
      "url": "https://agentsfirst.dev/principles/contract-first/",
      "category": "new",
      "anti_patterns_defended": ["agents-without-rules"]
    },
    {
      "slug": "prep-gates",
      "number": 3,
      "name": "Prep Gates",
      "summary": "Validate credentials, load fresh IDs, and confirm system health before every session. Stale context is the #1 source of agent errors.",
      "url": "https://agentsfirst.dev/principles/prep-gates/",
      "category": "applied",
      "anti_patterns_defended": ["agents-without-rules", "ship-and-forget"]
    },
    {
      "slug": "typed-state",
      "number": 4,
      "name": "Typed State",
      "summary": "All persistent agent state flows through a single structured data contract with versioned migrations. Each module owns its slice.",
      "url": "https://agentsfirst.dev/principles/typed-state/",
      "category": "applied",
      "anti_patterns_defended": ["lazy-wrapper"]
    },
    {
      "slug": "visible-outputs",
      "number": 5,
      "name": "Visible Outputs",
      "summary": "Agent actions produce human-readable results in existing workflow tools (Slack, email, task manager) — not a JSON blob in a dashboard nobody opens.",
      "url": "https://agentsfirst.dev/principles/visible-outputs/",
      "category": "applied",
      "anti_patterns_defended": ["slow-chatbot", "ship-and-forget"]
    },
    {
      "slug": "multi-model-verification",
      "number": 6,
      "name": "Multi-Model Verification",
      "summary": "High-stakes decisions fan out to multiple models. Trust agreement. A finding three models flag is almost certainly real; one model alone is a hypothesis.",
      "url": "https://agentsfirst.dev/principles/multi-model-verification/",
      "category": "applied",
      "anti_patterns_defended": ["single-model-trust"]
    },
    {
      "slug": "perspective-dispatch",
      "number": 7,
      "name": "Perspective Dispatch",
      "summary": "Complex reviews dispatch multiple constrained perspectives (security, UX, new-user, performance) against the same artifact. Each persona has a defined focus area.",
      "url": "https://agentsfirst.dev/principles/perspective-dispatch/",
      "category": "applied",
      "anti_patterns_defended": []
    },
    {
      "slug": "autonomous-recovery",
      "number": 8,
      "name": "Autonomous Recovery",
      "summary": "The system retries with backoff before alerting. Humans only get pulled in when self-healing has already failed — and the alert includes what happened, what was tried, and a direct link to take manual action.",
      "url": "https://agentsfirst.dev/principles/autonomous-recovery/",
      "category": "applied",
      "anti_patterns_defended": ["slow-chatbot"]
    },
    {
      "slug": "inspectable-state",
      "number": 9,
      "name": "Inspectable State",
      "summary": "Every agent server exposes its own operational state — queue depth, throughput, recent activity, trends, health — via a typed agent tool, not just a human dashboard. The complement to Visible Outputs: results to humans where they already are, system state to agents where they already are. Where Prep Gates answers 'is the system READY?', Inspectable State answers 'what is the STATE of the work?'.",
      "url": "https://agentsfirst.dev/principles/inspectable-state/",
      "category": "new",
      "anti_patterns_defended": ["black-box-server", "ship-and-forget"]
    }
  ],
  "adoption_levels": [
    { "level": 0, "name": "No agent access", "marker": "Human operates all tools through UIs" },
    { "level": 1, "name": "Agent as Afterthought", "marker": "Thin API wrappers; no contracts, no validation" },
    { "level": 2, "name": "Agent-Aware", "marker": "Usage rules exist; state is typed; pre-flight checks validate before use" },
    { "level": 3, "name": "Agents First", "marker": "Agent interface designed and shipped first; agent is primary consumer" },
    { "level": 4, "name": "Agent-Driven", "marker": "Agents extend the system for other agents; self-healing; multi-model checks" }
  ]
}