The Building

The architectural metaphor for Guildhall, drawing from three sources: Van Clief’s folder-as-workspace, MemPalace’s navigable memory structure, and the No Wrong Door routing philosophy.

The metaphor, made literal

Building concept	Implementation	Source
The Hall	Guildhall itself — the orchestration engine	Guild tradition
Wings	Workflow configurations (Quorum, Lugh, UVue)	MemPalace
Rooms	Pipeline stages or deliberation seats	Van Clief’s Layer 2
Halls	Connections between related rooms within a wing	MemPalace
Tunnels	Connections between shared concepts across wings	MemPalace
The Map	Top-level routing file (GUILD.md) the orchestrator always reads	Van Clief’s Layer 1
Skills	Plug-and-play capabilities wired into specific rooms	Van Clief’s Layer 3
Drawers	Verbatim audit logs, raw outputs, source material	MemPalace
Doors	Entry points — any input gets routed to the right wing	No Wrong Door

Three-layer routing (Van Clief)

Layer 1 — The Map. A top-level GUILD.md that every interaction reads first. Contains: folder structure, naming conventions, available wings, model registry location. The floor plan on the wall.

Layer 2 — The Rooms. Each wing and room has its own context file loaded only when active. Quorum’s Gamer seat loads its SEAT.md. Lugh’s Episode Generation stage loads its STAGE.md. Nothing else bleeds in.

Layer 3 — Skills and Tools. MCP servers, Ollama model calls, RAG pipelines, TTS engines — wired into specific rooms, not loaded globally. A room’s context file declares what skills it needs.

Memory architecture (MemPalace-inspired)

Guildhall stores everything and makes it findable:

• Wing-level memory: Each workflow accumulates institutional knowledge. Quorum remembers past evaluations. Lugh remembers past courses and learner patterns.
• Room-level memory: Each seat/stage builds expertise. The Gamer accumulates exploit patterns. The Historian accumulates analogous case studies.
• Tunnel-level memory: Cross-workflow connections. Lugh’s “source quality” concern and Quorum’s Historian seat are the same room in different wings, linked by a tunnel.

Memory is scoped: each room only loads its own memory plus explicitly tunneled context. Never burn tokens on irrelevant history.

No Wrong Door routing

The user doesn’t need to know the internal architecture. Entry points:

• “I have a product idea” → routes to Quorum
• “I want to learn about X” → routes to Lugh
• “Build this MVP” → routes to a builder workflow (future)
• “What did we decide about Y?” → routes to memory search across all wings

The routing layer reads the input, identifies intent, and opens the right door. Ambiguous inputs get clarified, not guessed at.

Physical building: Blackthorn

See Blackthorn for hardware specs. The building metaphor extends to the physical:

• Blackthorn is the hall — the brick and mortar
• Hoid is the doorkeeper — always awake, routes requests, wakes Blackthorn when work arrives
• Ollama is the workshop equipment — the tools the craftspeople use
• Models are the craftspeople — each with their own specialty, their own bench, their own tools