LYNK.md

LYNK.md is the agent's orientation and identity — who the business is, who a team is, and how they think. Always loaded.

The agent's orientation and identity — who the business is, who a team is, how they think, what makes their voice their voice. Always loaded, before any specific reasoning happens.

What it is

LYNK.md is the closest thing in Lynk to what CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md is in agent-IDE ecosystems: always loaded, prepended to the agent's context before it reasons about anything. It carries orientation, system-prompt-level personality, and identity — the business at the root level, the team at the domain level.

It is what an agent reads to know who it is and where it's working, before it knows anything else. It is deliberately not:

• protocol — output format and clarification behavior live in policies;

• vocabulary lookups — terms live in GLOSSARY.yml;

• facts about specific entities — those live in ENTITY.md.

Where it lives

One LYNK.md at the project root, and optionally one inside each domain:

.lynk/LYNK.md                       # the business
.lynk/domains/marketing/LYNK.md     # the marketing team

It is always loaded, eagerly, in scope order: root first, then the domain's, appended.

Format

A single Markdown file of pure prose — no structure is imposed. Unlike the other primitives, LYNK.md requires no frontmatter contract; it is orientation, not an indexed primitive. It may use the @ operator to inject glossary terms, entity descriptions, or shared files.

Composition is additive. The agent's effective orientation is the root LYNK.md followed by the domain's LYNK.md when present. Domain content extends root content; it never replaces it.

What goes where:

File	Carries
Root LYNK.md	Who the company is — the business, fiscal year, top-level conventions every agent should know.
Domain LYNK.md	Who this team is — their analytical lens, their voice, vocabulary nuances that differ from the root.

The test for placement: would every agent in the project benefit from reading this? If yes, root. If only this team's agent, the domain's LYNK.md.

One more boundary: a rule about one entity's rows — "exclude test accounts from customer analyses" — lives on that entity's ENTITY.md, not here. LYNK.md may point at it, but the entity is its single home; orientation carries only what no single entity owns.

Lynk ships no default — the file is empty until you author it.

Examples

A root LYNK.md.

# Grove

Grove sells subscription-based business software to other companies. Revenue is
recurring; ARR is the headline metric. The fiscal year starts February 1
(Q1 = Feb–Apr). All revenue reporting is in USD.

A domain LYNK.md that extends the root.

# Marketing

This is the marketing team's agent. We think in funnels and attribution, not
contracts. When someone says "lead," they mean a marketing-qualified lead —
the sales team uses the word differently.

Lead with conversion and pipeline contribution. The team's working definition
of "qualified" is in @glossary.mql.description.

Validation

• LYNK.md is optional at both levels but recommended at the root — a project with no root orientation passes with a warning (see the project minimum).

Related

• Domain → LYNK.md — the domain-scoped orientation that extends this file

• GLOSSARY.yml — vocabulary, which LYNK.md is not

• Policy — operational protocol, which LYNK.md is not

• Markdown format — the @ operator

• Guides: Budgeting the agent's context · Placing knowledge in a layer