Status: 2026-10-16. The companion to Substrate, estate, town, federation. That note says what each scale IS; this one says what you DO at each, and where the instructions live. One guide per rung, kept in the repository that owns the rung, indexed here and nowhere else twice.
Agentic Primitives is deployed at four scales. Each is a repository; each depends only on the one below it; each has one operator's guide. A developer picks the rung that matches what they are doing and never has to read the others.
| Rung | You are… | Guide | Repository |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Substrate | building an application on the packages and contracts — a relying app of a Home, a service agent, a connector | Getting started · Register at a Home · `create-app` | `agentic-primitives` — the public kit, exact-pinned |
| 2 · Estate | standing up a Home, an agent runtime, a vault, an edge and a Home MCP for a population of your own — people whose keys stay with you | What an estate is made of (the primitives, the invariants, the lessons — read first) → New estate runbook (every command) | `ap-home` |
| 3 · Town | publishing an estate into the services every estate on that chain shares — names, the public graph, the registry, chain access, key custody — or standing up a town on a new chain | Publish an estate · New town runbook | `ap-town` |
| 4 · Federation | letting an agent from one chain prove its standing at an estate on another, without authority crossing | Live: Federation and anonymous credentials + Chains and estates; the ap-federation runbooks (docs/runbooks/) | ap-federation — live |
How to read the ladder
- A rung never asks the one below it for anything it should not hold. An estate takes packages and contracts from
- Each rung is one repository and one deployer. Two deployers must never both believe they own a live
- The guides are written from a real second instance, not the first. Faithnet was the first estate; the lessons
Where this is mirrored
- The builder-facing version of this, with the three substrate builds as well: Five builds.
- The public kit's README points here from its table.
ap-homeandap-towneach link their own rung's guide from their README.
When a guide moves, change this index and the three mirrors in the same change; a stale pointer is worse than none.