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 is not competing on
- claw-code / OpenClaw — single-agent coding loops and provider matrices
- Omnigent-style wrappers — composing external harnesses with policy YAML
- LangGraph / workflow DSLs — hand-drawn agent graphs
What Castellan owns
| Wedge | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Pressure-field scheduler | castellan run, stigmergy benches in verify.sh |
| In-tree multiplexer | HerdR-shaped socket API, no external binary |
| Topology evolution | castellan evolve, .castellan/topology_archive.json |
| Honest verification | castellan drift-check, plugin-grounded fitness |
Adoption framing
Use Castellan when coordination geometry must evolve from episode logs — not when you need a drop-in Claude Code replacement.