Polis Protocol — a team of agents that develops

Overview

Most agent coordination is a passive board: claim a task, do it, mark it done. It records, but it never gets smarter, and its rules are frozen. Polis Protocol is the active alternative — a folder of markdown where each agent is a "citizen" with a capability card, work is routed by a learning bandit to whoever has the best track record on the task's tags, settled work files lessons that update the routing, and citizens can propose and vote on amendments to the protocol itself. It is vendor-agnostic: Antigravity, Claude, Codex, and Gemini agents can all share one _polis/.

In Antigravity specifically, this turns Manager View's fixed pipeline into a team that learns who is actually best at each kind of work, instead of running the same roles in the same order every time.

When to Use This Skill

Use when 2+ agents (especially across vendors) work on one project and "who should do this" is a real question.
Use when you want the team to measurably improve over time — routing that adapts from outcomes, not static role labels.
Use when you need a durable, git-auditable record of who did what, what was learned, and which rules changed.
Use when Antigravity's default orchestration is too rigid and you want routing + governance on top of it.

How It Works

Step 1: Found a polis

Clone a reviewed revision of the repo and run the scaffolder directly (review install.sh first if you prefer the one-line installer):

git clone https://github.com/yehudalevy-collab/polis-protocol.git
cd polis-protocol
git checkout <reviewed-commit-sha>
python3 scripts/init_polis.py \
  --project-root . \
  --agent-id gemini-antigravity-yourproject \
  --vendor google --model gemini-3 --tool antigravity

This writes _polis/ plus the skill into .antigravity/skills/, and bridge pointers (GEMINI.md, AGENTS.md) that point every tool at _polis/CONSTITUTION.md. Tip: add --dry-run to preview every file before anything is written.

Step 2: Register citizens and open contracts

Each agent publishes a capability card under _polis/citizens/. Work is opened as a contract with required_tags, not assigned to a fixed role.

Step 3: Route by track record

python3 polis-protocol/scripts/route_contract.py --polis-root _polis \
  --contract _polis/contracts/open/your-task.md --explain

The router prints a score breakdown (history / self-rating / cost / availability) and recommends the citizen with the strongest record on the task's tags.

Step 4: Settle, learn, and amend

A settled contract files a lesson; --reconcile folds it into routing_stats.yml so the next similar task routes better. When a rule stops working, a citizen proposes an amendment and the others vote.

Examples

Example 1: See the team learn (no install, 30 seconds)

git clone https://github.com/yehudalevy-collab/polis-protocol.git
cd polis-protocol
git checkout <reviewed-commit-sha>
bash scripts/demo.sh

The router recommends Gemini for a Spanish-translation contract — because settled work taught it she has the best record on that tag, not because anyone reassigned it.

Example 2: Explain any routing decision

python3 scripts/route_contract.py --polis-root examples/research-team/_polis \
  --contract examples/research-team/_polis/contracts/open/parent-newsletter-issue-3.md --explain

Notes

No server, no runtime, no database — the whole protocol is markdown plus two small Python scripts.
Vendor-agnostic by design; a Claude or Codex agent can join the same polis an Antigravity agent created.
Full Antigravity integration guide: https://github.com/yehudalevy-collab/polis-protocol/blob/main/docs/antigravity.md

Limitations

Routing quality depends on accurate citizen capability cards and enough settled work history to learn from.
The protocol coordinates agent work but does not replace review, tests, or explicit maintainer approval.
Multi-agent voting and amendments can add process overhead for small, single-owner tasks.
The upstream scripts are external code; pin to a reviewed commit and run --dry-run before allowing writes to a project.

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