Design (philosophy and trade-offs)

This section freezes what liel aims for as a portable external brain for LLM workflows and, just as importantly, what it deliberately does not do. Beyond storage, the design assumes memory files may be shared, diffed, and merged like other team artifacts—reviewability is part of the product boundary described here and in Product trade-offs. The byte-level format and reliability contract live under Behavior and specifications, while API-level operational guidance lives next to the relevant interfaces in the guide.

Document	Content
Design principles	Short statement of the product's core values and how they map to the rest of the design docs
Architecture overview	Logical model, page and WAL structure, adjacency lists, and system layering
Single-writer guard	How liel rejects unsafe double-writer opens and reclaims stale lock directories
Product trade-offs	Scope, deliberate non-goals, concurrency stance, and storage-format decisions