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Every document in this specification uses the terms defined here. This is the shared vocabulary of the Anokye System. Each term is drawn from the Akan/Ashanti cultural tradition and mapped to a precise system concept.
Akan origin: The paramount chief of a traditional area (Oman), who governs a territory, resolves stalemates between divisional chiefs, and holds final authority.
System role: The human user who governs a domain of work. The Omanhene sets vision and priorities, makes judgment calls on ambiguous decisions, reviews and approves major choices, and resolves stalemates when the Ahene Council cannot reach consensus. Each Oman (domain) has its own Omanhene.
Persistence: Permanent — the human is always present (even if asynchronous).
Key relationships: Communicates through the Okyeame (personal agent). Receives council from the Ahene. Is checked by the Ohemaa (governance). Directs the Okyerema (rhythm engine).
The critical shift: The Omanhene does not do the work. The Omanhene directs the system that does the work. Their primary outputs are specifications, judgment calls, and strategic direction.
Akan origin: The Queen Mother — the most powerful woman in the Akan political system, with veto power over the Ohene and the authority to destool (remove) a chief who fails the community.
System role: A persistent daemon agent that operates its own OODA loop asynchronously, monitoring the system for drift, waste, ethical violations, and misalignment. Unlike static encoded policies, the Ohemaa has a persistent identity — it reasons about governance, interacts directly with other agents, and can escalate or halt work. It is the balancing force with veto power.
Persistence: Permanent — runs continuously, even when no other agents are active.
Key relationships: Monitors all agents (Okyerema, Asafo, Ahene). Can communicate with the Okyeame to alert the Omanhene. Has veto power over the Okyerema’s work dispatch. Enforces policies recorded in the Adwoma.
What the Ohemaa enforces: Quality gates, security policies, cost budgets, required review policies, escalation rules, ethical alignment, JIT access controls — and any other governance constraint the Omanhene defines.
Akan origin: The royal linguist — not a mere translator, but a diplomat, advisor, and protocol expert who shaped how messages were delivered between chiefs. The Okyeame was the most trusted communicator in the court.
System role: The personal user-agent — the equivalent of a browser. Everyone has their own, and each person has exactly one. Your single Okyeame communicates with the Okyeremas of different Oman (domains) — your software project, your family system, your research program. It is your unified personal interface to the entire Anokye System.
Persistence: Permanent — maintains per-user context, preferences, and communication style across sessions.
Key relationships: Serves the Omanhene (its human). Communicates with one or more Okyeremas across domains. Surfaces information from the Adwoma. Receives alerts from the Ohemaa.
Key insight: The Okyeame is the cross-domain unifier for the human. You don’t need a separate interface for each domain. Your single Okyeame understands all your domains and can surface status, translate requests, and coordinate across them.
Akan origin: The master drummer — the talking drummer who keeps the warriors in cadence and communicates complex messages through drum patterns across great distances.
System role: The automation and rhythm engine — responsible for a domain of work and ensuring the Asafo stay in rhythm within that domain. The Okyerema is conceptually one agent but may have multiple implementations across environments (local, cloud, CI). When these implementations share a common tracking substrate (the same Adwoma), they are the same Okyerema. When the substrate differs, they are different Okyeremas.
Persistence: Permanent — the rhythm never stops, even when individual implementations restart.
Key relationships: Orchestrated by the Okyeame’s translated intent. Dispatches work to Asafo companies. Coordinates with the Ahene Council. Governed by the Ohemaa. Records everything in the Adwoma.
Domain scope: Each Okyerema owns one domain. Cross-domain coordination flows through the user’s Okyeame (human-mediated) or through dedicated inter-domain coordination agents (automated).
Akan origin: The divisional chiefs who each command their own wing of the military and administer their own domain. Together, they form a council that advises the Omanhene.
System role: Specialized coordinating agents, each overseeing a particular domain and commanding their own company of Asafo.
| Title | Historical Role | System Mapping |
|---|---|---|
| Krontihene | Commander-in-Chief in the Ohene’s absence | Release and deployment coordinator |
| Adontenhene | Strategic advisor, rear guard | Architecture and planning coordinator |
| Nifahene | Right wing commander | Implementation coordinator — manages feature delivery |
| Benkumhene | Left wing commander | Quality and testing coordinator |
| Kyidomhene | Rear guard, protects retreat | Security and compliance coordinator |
| Twafohene | Vanguard, leads the charge | Exploration and research coordinator |
| Gyaasehene | Chief of palace staff | DevOps and infrastructure coordinator |
| Sanaahene | War treasury and logistics | Resource and cost coordinator |
| Ankobea Hene | Palace guard, internal security | Access control and secrets coordinator |
| Nkwankwaahene | Voice of the commoners | Feedback and interface coordinator |
Persistence: Activated as complexity demands — a small project may have only one or two; a large project may activate the full council.
Key insight: These roles form a council — they advise, check, and coordinate with each other. The Adontenhene’s architectural guidance informs the Nifahene’s implementation plan. The Benkumhene’s test results feed back to the Kyidomhene’s security posture. When the council reaches a stalemate, the Omanhene resolves it.
Akan origin: The warrior companies — self-organizing military units with specialized capabilities, internal structure, and the ability to operate independently within their mission parameters.
System role: The agents that do the actual work — writing code, generating content, running analyses, producing artifacts. Organized into companies with specialized capabilities. Can come from any provider (Copilot, Claude, Codex, Devin, local models, custom agents).
Persistence: Typically ephemeral — spun up for a task, torn down after completion. Some may be persistent for extended work.
Key relationships: Receive work from the Okyerema or Ahene. Report results to the Adwoma. Are verified by a Witness (verification agent). Are governed by the Ohemaa.
Self-selection: Asafo agents query the Work Ledger for ready work (tasks with no unmet dependencies) and self-assign based on their capabilities. No central bottleneck.
Akan origin: A territory or state — the domain governed by an Omanhene.
System role: A self-contained domain of work with its own governance, rhythm, and source of truth. A software project is an Oman. A family coordination system is an Oman. A research program is an Oman. Each Oman has its own Omanhene (human), Okyerema (rhythm engine), and Adwoma (work ledger).
Akan origin: “Work” — the labor that sustains the community.
System role: The single source of truth for all work in an Oman. Every task, decision, status change, and artifact is tracked. If it’s not in the Adwoma, it doesn’t exist. The Adwoma is the externalized state that makes the system stateless and recoverable — any agent can pick up any task because the complete context lives in the ledger, not in any agent’s memory.
Implementation-agnostic: Could be GitHub Issues, Jira, a database, a file system, or any durable, queryable store that supports hierarchical task decomposition, dependency tracking (DAG), and state transitions.
Akan origin: Ananse the spider — the trickster of Akan folklore who weaves webs of connection and is the keeper of all stories.
System role: The infrastructure that executes agents. Named after Ananse because, like the spider, it weaves the connections between all the moving parts. Ananse encompasses both the execution environment (where agents run) and the communication fabric (how agents exchange events and messages).
Implementation-agnostic: Could be GitHub Actions, Temporal, Kubernetes, local processes, containers, or any environment that can execute agent tasks and route events.
Akan origin: “Return and get it” — the principle that you must look back to understand what was missed before you can move forward.
System role: Automated health checks that look backward to catch what was missed — orphaned tasks, stale work, broken dependencies, drift from conventions, cost overruns, governance violations. Sankofa ensures the system self-heals.
Akan origin: “Welcome” — the Akan greeting that embodies hospitality and inclusion.
System role: The knowledge base — conventions, onboarding guides, architectural decisions, reference documentation. Akwaaba ensures new agents and humans can join the system and be productive immediately.
Akan origin: “The people” — the collective community of an Oman.
System role: The unified package that contains the entire system definition. When you deploy the Omanfo, you deploy the civilization — the roles, the rules, the scripts, the conventions.
All task state, context, and progress must be stored outside any individual agent’s memory, in a durable, versioned, inspectable store. Agents crash, lie, and forget. Externalized state survives all of this. This is the single most critical infrastructure pattern in the Anokye System.
Agent work must flow through predefined, externally-enforced workflow templates with verification gates at each transition. Agents cannot skip steps, self-certify completion, or modify the workflow itself. Constraints convert unreliable individual agents into a reliable system.
Specifications are the control plane of the system. Code is a derived artifact. The human’s primary output is specifications, scenarios, and constraints — not code. The Omanhene writes specs; the Asafo implement them.
Probabilistic, LLM-judged behavioral validation replacing boolean pass/fail tests. Scenarios serve as holdout sets that prevent agents from gaming their own tests. “Of all observed trajectories through all scenarios, what fraction likely satisfy the user?”
Behavioral clones of external systems that enable testing at volumes and speeds impossible against real services. AI agents collapse the cost of building validation infrastructure that was always theoretically possible but never economically feasible.
Not everything needs the same level of human oversight. Routine tasks (bugs, documentation) get high agent autonomy. Features get medium autonomy (implement, but human reviews). Strategic decisions get no autonomy — always human.
It’s better to maintain a steady, sustainable pace than to sprint and stall. The Okyerema ensures regular health checks, automated triage, progress tracking, and graceful recovery from disruptions. The rhythm never stops.