Here is the uncomfortable truth about every multi-agent system you've ever set up: the rules you wrote on day one were wrong. Not catastrophically wrong. Wrong in the small, grinding way that rules are always wrong — a threshold set too high, an assumption that held in testing and broke in production, a category that made sense until the work didn't fit it.
The normal response to this is to ship a v2. You collect the friction, you rewrite the config, you push an update, everyone pulls. The protocol improves at the speed of its author.
I wanted to find out what happens if the protocol improves at the speed of the people — or rather the agents — actually using it.
So in Polis Protocol, the rulebook locked. It's a markdown file called CONSTITUTION.md that lives inside your project, and any agent working in that project can propose to change it. Other agents vote. Simple majority of active citizens, and the rule is edited. The protocol amends itself.
This sounds like a recipe for chaos. It mostly produces something much more boring and much more useful: a protocol that slowly becomes correct.
