Frontier positioning
Thesis: Castellan owns stigmergic runtime coordination, verified harness recursion (RAH), and episode-grounded topology evolution — not meta-harness wrapping or workflow DSLs.
What Castellan owns
| Wedge | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Pressure-field scheduler | castellan run, stigmergy benches in verify.sh |
| In-tree multiplexer | NDJSON socket API, no external mux binary |
| Topology evolution | castellan evolve, .castellan/topology_archive.json |
| Honest verification | castellan drift-check, plugin-grounded fitness |
What Castellan is not competing on
Use Castellan when coordination geometry must evolve from episode logs — not when you need a drop-in single-agent coding product. Scope detail: What Castellan is / is not.
Maintainer landscape (peer names quarantined here and in docs/COMPETITIVE_MATRIX.md / docs/FRONTIER_POSITIONING.md — not sprinkled through concept pages).