Architecture

Benchmark first

Start with one slice each from BEIR, FEVER, and LongMemEval. They expose retrieval, evidence, updates, temporal reasoning, and abstention. Record quality, latency, tokens, storage, and corpus revision from the first prototype; the same cases become regression gates as components change.

Values cross explicit boundaries. Mari plans and validates; the application performs side effects.

Sourcesprovider APIs

poll

Documentsidentity · revision · ACL

derive

Knowledgefacts · answers · decisions

retrieve

Contextallowed · fresh · cited

Mari supplies	Application supplies
Typed values and pure planning functions	Database and transactions
Connector polling and cursor contracts	Credentials, HTTP transport, retries, scheduler
Strict parsers for generated values	Model, prompts, and inference
Retrieval and index serialization	Embeddings and index lifecycle
Policy and evaluation functions	Authorization and agent runtime

How it works

Provider data is normalized into immutable values. Pure functions transform those values into plans, candidates, reports, or index payloads. The caller validates the return value and commits it through its own transaction boundary. Because network and storage operations are injected, the same input values can be replayed in tests before any side effect occurs.

Research and standards

W3C PROV data modelData pipeline reproducibility

Provenance and reproducibility motivate explicit entities, revisions, activities, and captured configuration. The pure-planning/application-commit split is a Mari engineering contract.