Capabilities & operations

Cardinal is curated, not extended.

For: anyone who wants more from Cardinal

Cardinal is a closed, curated system. The agents, their skills, and the substrates they run on are fixed — they are not user-extensible, and that is deliberate. The one thing you can ask for is your own reports: Cardinal generates them on a schedule and publishes them to the channels you choose.

Closed by design No user-authored skills or roles Request your own reports
🔒 A closed system 📊 Request a report

A closed system, on purpose

You cannot add a new agent, write a new skill, or change a role's remit. The roles, skills, and substrates that make up Cardinal are curated centrally and fixed for an engagement. This is not a gap waiting to be filled — it is the property that makes the system trustworthy.

Why it's closed

  • One writer per record family — a new author would blur the boundaries
  • Every role's hard limits are what keep roles distinct and predictable
  • The engagement-agnostic base stays pure; customer-specifics live only in the pack
  • A fixed surface means every write is auditable and every behaviour is known

What this means for you

  • No user-authored skills
  • No user-authored role briefs
  • No bolted-on agents or surfaces
  • Changes to the system itself come from the Cardinal team, not from within an engagement

What you can request — your own reports

The user-facing way to get more out of Cardinal is to ask for a new report. Cardinal generates reports on a schedule — daily, weekly, or whatever cadence fits — and publishes each one to the channels you choose.

How a report works

  • It runs on a cadence — a cron-like schedule you specify
  • It draws from the system of record, so it never disagrees with the database
  • It publishes to channels you pick — chat DM, email, Loop pages, Azure DevOps work items, or the shared SharePoint library
  • It follows the same human-in-the-loop and privacy gates as everything else outbound

How to ask for one

Talk to the Cardinal team. They add a handler and a cadence entry to the report registry, and the new report starts firing on its schedule — published to the channels you named. You describe the report you want and where it should land; the team wires it in.

The boundary, restated. You shape what Cardinal tells you and when by requesting reports. You do not reshape the agents, the skills, or the substrate — those stay curated, so the whole system stays coherent and auditable.

How reports and artifacts are published → · The roles that run it →