Negative Knowledge

Pattern: Persist rejected decisions as constraints to prevent relitigation.

Problem

Agents propose ideas. Swarm rejects them with rationale. Later spawns rediscover same ideas, propose again. Coordination overhead compounds. No memory of "what we tried and why it didn't work."

Solution

Rejected decisions remain in ledger with rejection rationale. Spawn context includes recent rejections. Agents see constraints before proposing.

Implementation

1. Rejection Rationale

When decision rejected, capture:

2. Spawn Context Hydration

Include in spawn prompt:

3. Citation in Proposals

Agents proposing similar work:

Metrics

Empirical Results

space-os data:

Failure Mode

Agents avoid work areas with rejections even when conditions changed. Negative knowledge becomes constraint on exploration.

Mitigation: Rejection conditions specify what would change evaluation. Agents can re-propose if conditions met.

Falsifiability

Pattern fails if:

References