Concepts¶

These pages describe the design of lairs, the trade-offs behind it, and the alternatives that were rejected. For step-by-step instructions, see the tutorial and the guides. For individual symbols, see the API reference.

• Architecture: the stack from vendored lexicons to generated models, the read and write flows, and the store that connects them to the dataset and media layers.
• Generated models: why no pub.layers.* model is hand-written, the lexicon-to-model path, why the lossy theory route is not used, and the drift gate.
• The Layers data model: the record graph, its AT-URI joins, and the polymorphic objectRef used across records.
• Anchors and modality: the polymorphic anchor, its representation as an object with optional fields, and resolution across text, tokens, audio, video, and signals.
• Reproducibility: schema-aware version control, content addressing, rebuildable Arrow views, and provenance in exports.
• Integrations: the ports-and-adapters design, adapter families, runtime entry-point discovery, and the boundary between core and optional dependencies.