Foundations
The principles and premises Meridians is built on.
Meridians documentation
The documentation is a routed knowledge system, not a god document. Use the generated Knowledge Atlas for the macro picture across corpus weight, concepts, links, authority, and status. Use the tree below to enter the smallest branch that answers your question; a leaf owns one concept and links only to its immediate neighbours.
knowledge-base/
├── knowledge/ maintained, authored concept hubs
│ ├── foundations/ values and durable framing
│ ├── product/ promise, people, behaviour, strategy, and economics
│ ├── vocabulary/ canonical concept leaves
│ ├── architecture/ runtime, canonical state, and boundaries
│ ├── governance/ permission and security contracts
│ ├── operations/ configuration, release, and Hosted support
│ ├── conventions/ repeatable model, narrative, and UI rules
│ ├── worlds/ authored fictional canon and structured world contracts
│ └── plans/ intentionally future-facing specifications
├── diagrams/ maintained visual leaves, grouped by concept / flow / UI
├── personas/ maintained audience and onboarding leaves
├── specs/ bounded proposals that graduate into a maintained leaf when shipped
├── generated/ machine-produced reference and evidence; never hand-edit
└── insights/ local diagnostic bundles; generated, ignored, and never authoritative
Choose a branch
- Learning the product or making a product decision: product
- Changing code, state, API, or UI structure: architecture
- Running, securing, configuring, or releasing an instance: operations
- Defining or checking a product term: vocabulary
- Changing authority, access, or a security boundary: governance
- Naming or applying a repeatable rule, including copy/localisation: conventions
- Reading or extending first-party fictional canon: worlds
- Assessing an unshipped change: plans
- Inspecting a code projection, measured debt, or an all-in-one diagram export: generated
- Seeing the macro knowledge picture beyond hierarchy: Knowledge Atlas
- Reviewing local repository, knowledge, static, economics, or forecast signals: insight bundles
Maintained leaves are the source of truth. Generated reference is a local artefact — git-ignored, materialised by npm install and rebuilt with npm run gen:all — so an unrelated branch never conflicts over a projection of the code; npm run knowledge:check verifies the committed budgets that ratchets measure a push against. The coding-agent router is ../AGENTS.md.
Root
10 articles- Alignment — legible worlds and accountable agencyPublic
The philosophical spine. Values says what we represent; Positioning says what the product is; Memory Palace says what it is to inhabit. This document says why the architecture favors typed worlds, situated context, provenance, and one write path. It is an internal frame, not a claim that...
- Authorship and provenance — who made whatPublic
Meridians was conceived, designed, and built end to end by Jason Yu. The architecture, product constitution, founding vocabulary, and experiential direction are his authored work. This is a statement of origin and continuing stewardship, not a claim over every world, source, or action that...
- MeridiansPublic
Meridians is a causal simulator for decisions under consequence and training: a kept world you can run forward, act inside, remember, and retry.
- The 2026-09-01 pivot — Explorable VN worlds as the consumable artifactPublic
What changed: The lead promise moves from "a maintained Domain you can understand and play" to "worlds you can read" — an explorable visual novel positioned against the book on replayability, immersion, and POV richness. The existing stack is not retired; it is recast as the production line....
- The grove — 木 and Meridians World Search (MWS) on a storyPublic
Foundational stance, not a shipped system. This page names what a narrative is under the pentad once branches exist — a living tree under pressure — and what tending it would mean. It commits to no mechanism. Two magics says what is real underneath the five; the pentad spec owns the forces and...
- The Memory Palace — the experiential framePublic
This is an INTERNAL design compass, not external copy. The market facing identity lives in Positioning — a turn based graph world engine for distributed agency . This document names the thing from the inside : what Meridians is to inhabit and build toward . Positioning answers "why is it...
- Two magics, five magicsPublic
Ontological stance, not a runtime measurement. This page says what Meridians takes to be real underneath the five forces it models, so that contributors read the pentad as a model and not as metaphysics. The pentad spec owns the five and their cycles; the World Spirit page owns the account of...
- Values — what Meridians representsPublic
The transcendent layer: what's true about this company across every task, release, and rewrite. Product identity lives in POSITIONING.md; this is the why beneath it — the values a contributor (human or agent) carries into every change. When a decision isn't covered by a rule, decide the way...
- Wiki classification policyPublic
How the public Wiki separates public, internal, and confidential knowledge.
- World SpiritPublic
Internal philosophical commitment, not a runtime measurement or product claim. This document gives contributors a shared Hegelian way to think about the coherence behind Scenario and World. Meridians may reason through World Spirit without pretending its scorer proves history's meaning or...