Meta-Agentic Bootstrapping: A Position Paper on Governed Artifact-Centric Agentic Coding Systems

Agentic systems are typically constructed by granting an underlying model action-like capabilities through prompts, tools, memory, filesystem context, and execution routines. This paper describes a different design principle: instead of instrumenting a raw language model, one embeds an already capable coding agent as the inner execution layer of an outer, domain-specific agent scaffold. The result is a meta-agent whose performance gains arise less from larger model weights than from recursive composition, explicit artifact grammars, validators, and iterative runtime correction. We call this principle Meta-Agentic Bootstrapping. This is a conceptual position paper: it formalizes the pattern, distinguishes it from multi-agent systems and classical self-reflection methods, analyzes its mechanisms and failure modes, and proposes an evaluation protocol for future empirical work. No proprietary implementation details, private directory structures, or confidential scaffold contents are disclosed.