Smart-Kickoff Load Contract is the rule at the center of 📝Smart-Kickoff that sorts every source an AI coding agent might read by when it earns its place — now, before a risky action, when a lifecycle phase starts, or never by default — rather than by topic.
The contract begins with a definition of bloat that has nothing to do with length: context is bloat when it is paid for by default but is not needed for orientation, the next decision, the next irreversible action, or the current phase of work. A long manual is not bloat if it loads only when its trigger fires; a short rule is bloat if it rides in every launch prompt and nobody reads it. Most agent setups fail this test by treating context as a pile — instructions, operating manuals, safety rules, incident history, and task notes all pushed into the launch prompt because each once mattered.
The contract names six buckets, and the bucket name is part of the machine contract, not a label. required_now holds what an agent needs before orientation and scope decisions, rendered as compact slices or exact section reads, never a blanket full-document read. required_before_mutation holds what must be read before a state-changing operation, loaded only when that operation is proposed. triggered_deterministic_lookup holds sources loaded because a machine-readable predicate fired. deferred_runbook holds an ordered procedure for a phase, loaded when the phase begins. optional_reference holds indexes, full manuals, history, and rationale — linked, never loaded unless a trigger or a human asks. semantic_retrieval is empty at launch and is discovery only: it can surface a likely source, but it can never satisfy a safety gate or authorize a mutation. Every source the launcher selects is written to a session manifest under its bucket, so the manifest doubles as the audit trail of what loaded and why. The 📝Smart-Kickoff — Agent Buildbook walks an adopting agent through mapping these buckets onto its own stack.
We wrote this because "read everything first" felt safe and behaved like a tax: every session paid for stale manuals it never opened while the one rule that mattered sat buried beside old incident history.