Inspiration — the academic shoulders we stand on

The architectural rationale behind agentfootprint, organized into two pillars.

                THE WHY                          THE HOW
        (user-visible win)              (engineering discipline)
              ▼                                   ▼
   ─────────────────────────         ─────────────────────────
        Connected data                Modular boundaries
       (Palantir lineage)           (Liskov ADT + LSP lineage)
   ─────────────────────────         ─────────────────────────
              ▼                                   ▼
   Fewer iterations to find        Clean boundaries make
   the answer · less re-work       connection tractable

Pages

Pillar	Page	One-line summary
THE WHY	Connected data — the Palantir lineage	Palantir’s 2003 thesis (connect data, not analysts) returns at agent runtime. Disconnected state burns iterations and tokens. agentfootprint connects four classes of agent data (state · decisions · execution · memory).
THE HOW	Modularity — the Liskov lineage	Liskov’s ADT + LSP work, applied to flowcharts. Subflows are CLU clusters. CacheStrategy / LLMProvider / ToolProvider are LSP-substitutable. Locality of reasoning is enforced as a runtime invariant.

Future entries (planned): the ReAct paper · Parnas information hiding · Hewitt actors · Anthropic Skills · flow-based programming.

How to read these

These pages are the rationale behind the library design — written for:

• Contributors who want to understand WHY a boundary is shaped the way it is before changing it
• Library evaluators comparing frameworks at the architectural level
• People who want to learn from the same sources we learned from

If you just want to use the library, start at Quick Start instead. The inspiration pages are not required reading.

Why these two pillars together

Liskov gives us boundaries that don’t leak — every framework interface is substitutable, every subflow hides its internals.

Palantir gives us connections within those boundaries — the agent can follow a thread across stages without re-discovering it on every iteration.

Boundaries alone produce a clean but dumb library. Connections alone produce a fast but unmaintainable one. Both together is the design.