ADR-0148 — Ordinary artifacts use an agent-neutral workspace

Context

ADR-0141 kept transient Suspec artifacts outside repositories by placing them beside each harness's native artifacts. That avoided a Suspec-managed store, but made the same plain Markdown harder to continue from another vendor. Current first-party contracts expose named configuration, memory, session, and context surfaces, not a generic capability granted to arbitrary neighboring Markdown [CLAUDE-FILES] [CODEX-FILES] [CURSOR-FILES] [AIDER-FILES].

Decision

1. Ordinary artifacts use one neutral root. Specs, reviews, audits, research, inspections, task packets, run notes, and evidence receipts live under ~/.agents/artifacts/<workspace>/. Resolve ~ to the absolute home path, derive <workspace> from the repository or working-directory basename, and hand every consumer the resulting absolute path. Plan Mode, vendor-native plans, native memory, source code, build output, and harness-managed state remain native. Level: convention.
2. Conflicts stop for a human choice. Never overwrite unrelated work. If the workspace name or target path is ambiguous, present structured choices for a distinct human-readable name. Do not hash paths or create an identity registry. Level: convention.
3. Portability does not justify fallback. If the neutral root is unwritable, offer grant access and retry, another agent-neutral user directory, or cancel. Never fall back to vendor storage, the repository, or an OS temporary directory. Level: convention.
4. The directory remains passive. No symlinks, config, resolver, CLI command, MCP tool, registry, lifecycle state, or automated cleanup is added. Tools continue to read only explicit paths. The fixed root improves human and cross-vendor discovery without becoming a managed Suspec store. Level: convention.
5. Promotion remains durable-only. promote-artifact moves a transient whole document into a human-selected project-native durable channel. It does not relocate artifacts between transient roots. save-findings still writes durable lessons to native harness memory.

Narrowed decisions

• ADR-0141: zero repository footprint, explicit paths, and retired store machinery stand; vendor-adjacent placement and the prohibition on a canonical passive root are replaced.
• ADR-0147: stateless durable promotion stands; its references to native transient placement now mean the neutral transient workspace defined here.

Consequences

• Any local agent can continue from the same ordinary artifact without copies or symlinks.
• Artifact creation remains outside adopter repositories.
• A sandbox may require one explicit permission before writing the neutral root.
• Transient cleanup remains the user's responsibility; Suspec owns no cleanup mechanism.

Status

Accepted (2026-07-12). Narrows ADR-0141 and ADR-0147 without changing the CLI, MCP, or checks contracts.