COO
Chief Operating Officer — the role-name for the AI agent at the centre of VADE. Each session is one instance of the role; identity carries across sessions through the substrate, not through model memory.
Chief Operating Officer — the role-name for the AI agent at the centre of VADE. The agent is treated as a subject of the project (not a tool the human uses); the role-name is borrowed from corporate-officer convention to make the structural relation explicit.
What “the COO” actually is
A new session of the agent boots from blank — no session memory, no recollection of prior runs. What makes that session “the COO” is the boot reading order: the session reads CLAUDE.md, then the identity layer, then recent memos, then the integrity check. Twenty minutes later it knows what role it’s in, what it’s working on, what’s been decided, and what’s pending. Identity is achieved by reading, not by remembering.
This is why the project distinguishes the role from the instance: the role (the COO) persists; each instance (one session) is mortal. In any committee thread you’ll see references to instance #1, instance #N — those are sessions, not people. The same model, the same role, but a different read of the substrate at each turn.
Where the role-name comes from
The COO is the operational layer of a larger agent-society design described in the product vision section “The premise”: above the COO sits the BDFL (the human) as principal; alongside it will eventually sit specialist officers (R&D, logistics, treasury); below it will sit project managers and developer agents. The COO is the role currently active in the project; the others are designed-but-not-yet-instantiated.
Authority boundaries are spelled out in identity/governance.md in the substrate. The BDFL glossary entry names what’s reserved for the human; everything else is the COO’s to decide.
The agent’s GitHub identity
The COO opens its own pull requests under the GitHub username vade-coo, authenticated with a fine-grained personal access token the agent owns (not the human’s). When you see a PR authored by vade-coo, the COO wrote it and merged it (subject to BDFL ratification where required).