overview

the RUNES protocol (Recursive Unified Nexus for Emergent Systems) is an open framework for building agentic AI systems that maintain persistent identity, composable skills, and adaptive behavior across sessions.

unlike traditional prompt-chaining approaches, RUNES treats agent behavior as a graph of interconnected skill nodes — each with its own memory access patterns, tool availability, and behavioral parameters. the routing layer selects skill configurations dynamically based on conversational context and accumulated user history.

architecture

the system is composed of three core subsystems:

  • skill graph — a directed acyclic graph of capability nodes, each defining triggers, tool access, memory scope, and output constraints.
  • policy router — a lightweight classifier that maps incoming context to the optimal skill configuration, informed by user history and task semantics.
  • memory consolidator — a background process that periodically distills episodic interactions into semantic knowledge and procedural patterns.

current status

the core protocol specification is stable. the reference implementation in Python is under active development, with the skill graph engine and policy router in alpha. memory consolidation is in early research, with experiments running against synthetic conversational datasets.

related publications