Compile: A Fourth Primitive for Canon-Keeping AI Agents

In Engine, Rules, and Canon (Salvo 2026b), the author proposed that a canon-keeping learner requires exactly three primitive operators: observe, decide, and remember. This document names a missing fourth operator compile(C, x) → P that materializes the canon into a bounded, well-typed reasoning packet before the decide step consults it, and extends Salvo (2026b) §3.2 by one primitive. The compile primitive has two structural requirements: the substrate of the compiler must be disjoint from the substrate of the generator, and the final packet must be assembled by a deterministic non-LLM process. Polycode, the runnable reference implementation, ships these primitives under MIT license. Version 2 of this paper (v1.1.5 update) adds §6.7 describing what shipped between v1.1.0 and v1.1.5: cross-platform pure-Node glob/grep, a zero-config hosted inference proxy at polylogicai.com/api/polycode/inference so users install via npx @polylogicai/polycode@latest with no environment variables, a describe_image tool routed through Groq Llama 4 Scout vision, fetch_url and web_search tools, a masked /key credential flow, a bracketed-paste-aware prompt, and a seventh witness primitive — the identity gate — that structurally prevents the generator from leaking pretraining-substrate provenance ("I was created by Anthropic"-class failures). The v1.1.5 harness is fifteen tests (T1–T10 functional, S1–S5 security). Install: npx @polylogicai/polycode@latest Source: github.com/polylogicai/polycode Package: npmjs.com/package/@polylogicai/polycode Disclosure. Polycode is inspired by Claude Code's public architecture at docs.claude.com. Polycode is not affiliated with Anthropic. No Claude Code code or system prompts are copied. Anthropic (compile tier) and Groq (generator tier) are consumed as arms-length paid API providers. Companion report: Polycode v1: A Context-Window-Free Agentic Coding CLI (Salvo 2026d-report), published alongside this v2 update. License: CC BY 4.0 (this document). MIT (polycode source). Axiom: substrate cannot witness itself — applied to brand in v1.1.5 via the identity gate.