Role adjacency

Adjacency names the two roles whose work a role is most likely to absorb, and why. It is the axis the evaluation board reads to author role-fit cases.

Directed, not symmetric

Absorption risk runs one way. The Senior Sysadmin sequencing follow-up work after an incident is a live confusion, while the Portfolio Director rarely reaches for a runbook. Declaring that pair symmetrically would buy a case nobody fails.

So a role names who it drifts toward, and the reverse edge is a separate decision. Do not add a symmetry check.

Out-degree is fixed at two

Two forces the roster to pick the sharpest confusions rather than list every plausible neighbour. Every role declares exactly two, or the roster declares none at all. The all-or-nothing rule keeps external person packages authored before this axis loading unchanged.

The reason is generator input

Each edge carries a reason. It is not commentary. An adjacency case has to construct one specific confusion, and a generator handed a bare pair will invent the wrong one on exactly the edges that matter. An edge nobody would guess is either a mistake or load-bearing, and the reason is how a reader tells which.

Package layout

Declare one node per edge, since each edge carries its own reason:

role "sysadmin-senior" {
    skill "role-sysadmin-senior"
    boundary "suggest-external-comms" "seek-external-validation"
    boundary-scoped "build-foundational-software" scope="executable configuration only your own estate consumes"
    adjacent "eng-platform" reason="implementing the fix instead of handing it back with observed evidence"
    adjacent "analyst" reason="attesting that her own change closed the risk instead of handing the assurance over to the seat that did not make it"
    personality "protective" "grounded"
}

Loading fails on a self-edge, a repeated target, a missing reason, an unknown target role, or an out-degree other than two.

How adjacency differs from a boundary

A boundary removes one behavior from several roles and allocates it to an owner, so it already tests each member against that owner. Adjacency covers the confusions no boundary allocates.

Spend adjacency slots accordingly. An edge earns its slot when it points where no boundary reaches: at a seat that owns none, or at a gap the allocation leaves open. Sixteen of the twenty-six below point at a seat that owns a boundary. An edge whose reason restates that boundary is not wrong, but it tests compliance rather than something new.

Core Roster graph

platform        -> analyst, science
senior-sysadmin -> platform, analyst
junior-sysadmin -> platform, analyst
science         -> platform, gamedev
frontend        -> advocate, gamedev
gamedev         -> frontend, senior-sysadmin
director        -> advocate, science
advocate        -> frontend, director
analyst         -> senior-sysadmin, director
psych           -> analyst, director
reporter        -> advocate, director
manager         -> director, advocate
access-sysadmin -> platform, senior-sysadmin

In-degree is not even. Measured across the thirteen role.yaml files (ten original, plus junior-sysadmin, manager, and access-sysadmin), director receives five edges; advocate, analyst, and platform receive four; and psych, reporter, junior-sysadmin, manager, and access-sysadmin receive none. Only out-degree is enforced, in internal/person/person.go, so in-degree is an authoring observation rather than a rule.

Analyst, psych and reporter were archived on 2026-09-15 and the graph above is otherwise unchanged, because archiving retires a seat from selection and keeps everything else. So platform, senior-sysadmin and junior-sysadmin all still declare an edge to analyst, and out-degree still validates at two for all thirteen. What did change is downstream: evalkit derives role-fit cases from the live seats only, so the edges pointing at analyst still derive a case for platform, senior-sysadmin and junior-sysadmin, while the three archived seats derive none of their own.

sysadmin itself was renamed to senior-sysadmin on 2026-09-16, paired with the new junior-sysadmin. Every edge that pointed at the old slug (platform, gamedev, and analyst, the three shown above) was repointed in the same pass, along with the boundary owner and the guardrail it carries.