Prim

The primitive unit of knowledge and memory for AI

Prim

Prim

Every file format today was made for humans. Prims are for AIs.

01

To understand why AIs need Prims, and not PDFs, we first have to understand why the printing press didn’t use a feather.

02

Before the printing press

Monks like Cassiodorus’s scribes copied every book by hand, page onto page. A Bible took about a year.

A monk at a sloped desk, copying a manuscript by hand.
Medieval illumination of a scriptorium — scribes at desks.

03

After the printing press

Mainz, 1455. A press could pull in a day what a monk copied in months. That is a productivity shock — not a new kind of book.

A fifteenth-century printing workshop.

The press didn’t use a feather.

04

In the span of 20 years, book output increased 100x per worker.

One year, one book. One year, about a hundred.

One book.
A stack of about a hundred books.

05

They did not scale the feather to a hundred feathers. The instrument itself changed to a press.

Excel files, PDFs, files like that — those are the feathers of the computing world. They were built for a time when we wrote everything by hand.

A table covered in quills.
A single printing press.

06

PDFs are the feather. Prims are the press.

Before AI, a person sat at a machine and made a file. That file became the idea, the product, the company, the mission, the trip. Spreadsheet, deck, PDF — that was the work. That’s file hell: humans living inside formats that never end.

Pre-AI

A human makes every file.

One person. Three formats. Three jobs.

After

Humans and AIs contribute. Files come out.

Same files. The arrow flipped.

1980s office worker at a CRT, trapped in a spreadsheet.
A format for a person at a machine.
Two people working together with a Prim on their screens.
Humans and AIs contribute to the same file.

Those formats were not designed for agents. They were designed before agents existed.

We made each file to represent a single concept. Prim reverses the order: store the concept, generate the files. Same Excel. Same deck. Different century of format.

A factory exists so a person isn’t the machine. Prim is that, for knowledge.

Enterprises love Prims because the work lasts, moves, and belongs to the company.

Time capsules

The work survives the person, the session, and the vendor. Open it in ten years. It’s still the Prim.

Shareable

One file. Desk to desk, agent to agent, counsel to the board. You send the prim — not a zip of conflicting sheets.

Company property

The knowledge is the firm’s. Not trapped in someone’s laptop, a chat log, or a tool that walks out the door.

AIs love Prims because they can finally hold the work.

They can read it

No scraping a deck. No guessing which tab is the source of truth. The file is native — agents reason over it without a translation layer.

They can trust it

Claims carry evidence, hashes, and provenance. Validation is fail-closed. An agent doesn’t have to hope the spreadsheet is right.

They can continue it

A session is a Prim. The next agent picks up the same file. Work doesn’t die when the window closes.

Read the spec Pre-AI

Pre-AI

  1. 80s

    1982–89

    Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, floppy disks

    One program. One file. One disk.

  2. 90s

    1990–99

    Excel, Word, PowerPoint

    The suite becomes the job.

  3. 00s

    2000–09

    PDF, email the attachment

    The file leaves the building.

  4. 10s

    2010–19

    Drive, Dropbox, Slack

    Cloud copies of the same files.

  5. 20s

    2020–

    Copilot, ChatGPT

    Agents arrive. Still opening those files.

We made each file to represent a single concept.

Spreadsheets for structure. Documents for decisions. Decks for the story. Notes for memory. Each file was a projection we had to author by hand — on whatever machine held that format.

1980s office worker at a beige PC, green spreadsheet on a CRT.
Spreadsheetstructure
1980s office worker typing a report on an early word processor.
Documentdecisions
1980s conference room watching an overhead projector.
Slidesthe story
1980s desk with a legal pad, floppy disks, and a CRT.
Notesmemory

Now

Store the concept. Generate the files.

Reverse the order. The Prim holds the idea once. Excel, Word, the deck, the notes — those come out of it. Same four files. The arrow flipped.

One file

The Prim is the concept.

  • Spreadsheet — generated
  • Document — generated
  • Deck — generated
  • Notes — generated
Then: files point into a reconstructed idea. Now: a Prim generates those same files.
Same four files. The arrow flipped.

Portable

Agent to agent. Agent to human. Human to agent.

Like PDF, for AI work

Adobe cracked portable documents. A Prim is a portable package of knowledge — the same file moves between people and agents without translation.

A session is a Prim

An AI session itself is a type of Prim. What people call the model “dreaming” is the raw work. The Prim is what it packages.

Schema first, then autonomy

Define great schemas for Prims up front and agents can finish the work. The spreadsheet is no longer the job — it is an export.

What a Prim is

A self-contained pack of knowledge — not an app, not a document, not a database dump.

AI-native

Agents can read, validate, reason over, and act on them without translation layers.

Memory

Durable, versioned, supersedable knowledge that persists across sessions and agents.

Evidence-first

Claims carry provenance, trust tiers, and hashes.

Generative interfaces

No fixed UX. Views are rendered on demand — json-render style.

Human-readable

Still openable and understandable by people.

Raw data, then package

A Prim is not the dream. It is what the dream becomes when it is packaged so the next agent — or person — can pick it up.

Prim as the source of truth, with arrows out to sheet, deck, interface, and agent views.
The Prim stays put. Sheets, decks, UIs, and agent reads are projections.

How to say it

If it needs a long explanation, it has not landed yet.

  1. 01Send me the prim.
  2. 02Don’t send the spreadsheet — just send the prim.
  3. 03An AI session itself is a type of Prim.
  4. 04Store the concept. Generate the files.

Technical names — OKF, ORF, OCSF — belong in specs. Everyday speech stays on Prim.

Packaging

A Prim is a pack. Sending one should be one file.

Directory packCanonical source of truth — git, editing, validation.
.prim.zipPrimary interchange. Attach this when you say send me the prim.
.prim.tar.gzAllowed. Unix and agent workflows.
.primReserved branded container. Zip under the hood.
Contents of a .prim.zip: index.md, log.md, structure.json, evidence, and docs.json.
A .prim.zip is a zip whose root is the pack. Attach that file.

The family

Prim is the name. OKF is the grammar.

Under the hood, Prims are additive Open Knowledge Format profiles from Eidos.

Tree from Prim to OKF to additive profiles EMF, ORF, OPF, ODFW, OPFF, OMF, and OCSF.
New domains arrive as profiles. Existing Prims keep validating.
OKFBase knowledge + trust EMFHuman intent + durable memory ORFResearch / investigation OPFProduct graph ODFWSpreadsheet → bronze proof OPFFPersonal finance packs OMFMeeting occurrences OCSFCorporate structure & capital

Don’t send the spreadsheet.
Send the prim.

The category specification, family map, and packaging rules live in the open. MIT. Early.

github.com/eidos-agi/prim