Acknowledgments

open-bridge stands on a large body of public work. Many of its ideas — agent-orchestration patterns, the propose-then-confirm posture, the identity/voice split, config-as-data conventions — were shaped by blog posts, papers, talks, and open-source projects encountered over time. It is not possible to name every source, and the absence of a name here is not a judgment of its worth.

Some inspirations are specific enough to name:

• The SOUL.md convention for agent voice/identity files — pioneered by Peter Steinberger (creator of OpenClaw), standardized by SoulSpec (soulspec.org), and since adopted across the agent ecosystem. Nous Research's Hermes agent — which uses a SOUL.md and a self-improving "curator" loop — directly informed open-bridge's bridge-curator and its learning-autonomy model (which inverts Hermes' auto-apply posture into a propose-then-confirm gate).
• Anthropic's Claude Code and the broader agent-tooling patterns it popularized — including the Agent Skills / SKILL.md format (agentskills.io) that open-bridge's skills build on.
• The AGENTS.md convention (agents.md) for agent-readable project instructions.
• Google Labs' DESIGN.md format for token-level design manifests.
• Tiago Forte's PARA method (Projects · Areas · Resources · Archives) — the default organization scheme behind the document-routing system.

This list is non-exhaustive, and inspiration is not endorsement: none of the projects named above are affiliated with, sponsor, or endorse open-bridge.

Where third-party code or text was incorporated directly, it is attributed at the point of use and its license is retained in that file's header. This document covers ideas and influence — which carry no such obligation — so that gratitude can be expressed freely without implying a legal or contractual relationship with any named work.