Delegation

Which agent picks up which bead. Labels on the bead carry this, so it does not have to be remembered.

Tiers

Label	Model	What it covers
`agent:sonnet`	Sonnet, medium effort	Gather, verify, compile to a fixed format. Research beads, note-writing beads, example hunts, reading beads. The bulk of the graph.
`agent:opus`	Opus	Course-facing material in Rufus's voice, and work that makes an argument rather than assembling one. Scripts, decks, the module template, the voice sweep.
`agent:human`	Rufus	Selection and decisions.

Container beads — the four epics, the six session beads, the 33 module parents — carry no agent label. They hold no work; their children do.

Why notes beads are Sonnet. Voice is deliberately deferred (below), which turns note-writing into gather-and-format. That is Sonnet work.

Why scripts and decks are Opus. That material is delivered under Rufus's name in a live session. Voice matters there and cannot be swept later.

What the bigger model bought in practice. The six candidate hunts ran on Opus, and most of what they did — search, verify, fill a format — Sonnet would have done. Three things came out of those runs that were judgment rather than retrieval: the argument that Montreal only teaches as a diagnostic result rather than a template; the rejection of a widely-repeated musk ox statistic on provenance grounds; and grading footage honestly rather than claiming it. Expect to lose some of that on a smaller model, and to catch it in review instead.

Voice is deferred

Do not spend effort matching Rufus's voice when writing wiki notes or research material. Write plainly and accurately. A systematic voice sweep happens later in one pass, which is cheaper and more consistent than thirty agents each approximating a register.

Notes beads carry voice:unreviewed. The sweep flips them to voice:reviewed.

writing-style.md still applies to course-facing material — the landing page, scripts, decks — where there is no later sweep.

What a note must contain

The binding requirement, in place of voice:

Every substantive claim carries a source.
Each note includes at least one direct excerpt as a markdown blockquote, attributed. The author's own words, not a paraphrase.

Excerpts are the point. A note that paraphrases Ostrom is worth much less than one that quotes her and says where it is from.

Quoting safely

Keep excerpts short — a sentence or two, enough to carry the author's own formulation. Never reproduce substantial portions of an in-copyright work.
Always attribute: author, work, year, page or section where known.
Public-domain sources can be quoted more freely, and several of the course's central texts are public domain — Hobbes, Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, Adam Smith, Hume. Prefer these where a longer passage would help.
For living authors and recent work — Ostrom, Henrich, Turchin, Norenzayan, Schelling — quote briefly and cite precisely.
Never quote from a source you have not read directly. If the quote comes from someone else quoting it, say so.

The prompt shape that works

From the six hunts that ran successfully, the instructions that did the most:

Name the output file and the entry format exactly. Freeform research comes back unusable.
"Say 'none known' rather than guessing." This is what produced graded, checkable media claims instead of confabulated ones.
"Flag what is contested and say what the dispute is." Roughly a quarter of all entries came back with a caveat that would otherwise have reached a slide unchallenged.
"Do not cut the list down." Over-generation is the job; selection is Rufus's.
Point at docs/wiki-conventions.md first.