NDV is a research program investigating whether adaptive selection of the minimum sufficient combination of software-engineering capabilities can improve the verified-success / total-cost / latency frontier relative to fixed execution strategies.
NDV is not an approved software architecture. It is research-first, falsification-driven, and explicitly allows NO_BUILD, REUSE_ONLY, and INCONCLUSIVE outcomes.
Use the ecosystem to NDV's advantage: models, coding agents, runtimes, verifiers, orchestrators, tools, and future systems are replaceable capabilities. NDV should benefit when they improve rather than compete with them.
The unit of composition is capability, not repository identity.
A candidate layer must pay for its own overhead. The default engineering order is:
REUSE -> ADAPT -> WRAP -> FORK -> BUILD CUSTOM
The default execution principle is:
minimum sufficient composition -> external execution -> independent evidence -> continue / verify / retry / handoff / escalate / stop
Minimize complete system cost subject to a required probability of verified success.
Primary research metric:
TOTAL_SYSTEM_TOKENS / VERIFIED_SOLVED_TASK
Accounting must also retain monetary cost, latency, retries, handoff, verification, context, routing, coordination, and failure cost. FREE != ZERO COST.
Do not assume NDV is correct. Research -> hypothesis -> controlled test -> evidence -> decision -> implementation.
Executor self-report is not task success. EXECUTOR_DONE != VERIFIED_SOLVED.
Mandatory architecture capabilities normally require holdout-confirmed evidence before becoming core.
- P1: executor and routing economics
- P2: continuity and handoff
- P3: composition selection
- P4: sequential adaptive control
- P5: integrated-system validation
Later phases do not start automatically. Negative results may eliminate them.
The research program was previously maintained in oigorbrito/dv. Historical DV artifacts remain authoritative at their original repository and commits and must not be silently rewritten as NDV artifacts.
Prospective NDV work is canonical in this repository from the cutover defined in provenance/dv-legacy-manifest.json.
Research only. No NDV runtime, router, orchestrator, memory system, generic agent framework, model gateway, or controller is approved for implementation.
See AGENTS.md and the governance documents under docs/ before making changes.