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aDNA Specification

v2.5 20 sections

Agentic DNA (aDNA) — a knowledge architecture standard for AI-native projects. Read it a section at a time below, or open the full specification to search or cite the whole document.

Two ways to read it

The section view — the contents below — is the one to read. Each section is its own page with its own next/previous links, which is what makes the standard readable on a phone; served as a single document it ran to roughly 124,000 pixels tall, which is not a document anyone reads, it is a document people scroll past.

The full text is the citable artifact. Use it when you need to search the whole standard at once, quote it, or point someone at a stable URL for the document rather than for a section of it. Both are generated from the same source, so they cannot disagree.

The 20 sections

  1. §1 Introduction & Scope
  2. §2 Terminology
  3. §3 Triad Architecture
  4. §4 Governance Files
  5. §5 Directory Structure
  6. §6 Naming Conventions
  7. §7 Frontmatter System
  8. §8 Session Model
  9. §9 Mission System
  10. §10 Context Library
  11. §11 Coordination Protocol
  12. §12 Template System
  13. §13 Collision Prevention
  14. §14 Content-as-Code Pipelines
  15. §15 Archive & Versioning
  16. §16 Tool Integration Tiers
  17. §17 Error & Recovery Protocol
  18. §18 Success Criteria
  19. §19 Optional Extensions
  20. §20 Appendices

Read the full specification on one page →

Before the split, the whole standard lived at this URL and people linked to headings inside it. Those links still land where they should: a fragment like #7-frontmatter-system is forwarded to whichever section now owns that heading, using a map built at build time from the rendered heading ids rather than guessed from the numbering. An unrecognised fragment goes to the full text, where every id from the old single-page version still exists.

With JavaScript disabled the forward does not happen and you land here, on a complete table of contents with the full text one click away — degraded, not broken. Worth stating plainly because a fragment is never sent to the server, so this is the only place the behaviour can be explained.

Citing and versioning

This is v2.5. Section URLs are stable across versions — a link to a section keeps working when its text changes — so cite the section URL and the version together rather than relying on either alone. Changes to the standard go through the public proposal process, and the changelog records what moved and when.