The ladder

Coherence isn't binary, and it isn't bought all at once. The ladder names what a project actually has, level by level. mix cohere prints where yours stands.

• L0Context by discoveryraw repo; agents grep and hope
• L1Static guidanceAGENTS.md, usage_rules; authored, unchecked
• L2Derived trutha system map reflected from compiled code: mix cohere.map
• L3Authored intent, checkedintent cards + the drift gate
• L4Governed verbs, verified behaviorboundary enforcement, Tidewave runtime introspection
• L5Delivered contextwork packets: mix cohere.packet

Each level is useful alone; none requires the previous. Phoenix 1.8 ships every new project at level 1. Cohere is levels 2–5, adopted incrementally: start with the map, add cards to the contexts that matter, and let the rest arrive when it earns its place.

Probing, never requiring

Cohere has zero runtime dependencies, so every capability is probed in the host app rather than required of it. The more you have installed, the more cohere derives; with nothing beyond Elixir you still get a working, if sparse, map.

• Ecto present. Objects and links appear in the map: real field types, enum vocabularies, associations with their actual foreign keys.
• Phoenix present. The route surface appears, LiveView unwrapped to its module and action.
• Oban present. The job surface appears: queues, uniqueness, and cron wiring read from config.
• boundary present. Level 4 lights up: write paths are compiler-governed, not convention-governed.
• Tidewave present. Work packets direct agents to verify behavior in the running app (project_eval, execute_sql_query) instead of inferring it from source.

What a level buys you

The rungs are ordered by the strength of the guarantee, not by effort. L1 is prose someone wrote once; nothing checks it. L2 cannot lie but knows nothing of intent. L3 is where the gate appears: authored intent that the build verifies is still current. L4 moves enforcement into the compiler and verification into the runtime. L5 is the payoff: context assembled and delivered for exactly the task at hand.