Development Coordination Protocol (DCP)

Development Coordination Protocol (DCP) is an open, vendor-neutral protocol initiated by the TokonoMix project — a machine-readable semantic protocol for exchanging project-coordination information between AI agents and humans.

Status: Draft — v1.0.0-draft (pre-release). This is an early, pre-release draft published for review and feedback. It is not a finalized standard; schemas and vocabularies may change before the v1.0.0 freeze.

It defines only the structure of project communication — project status, tasks, dependencies, architecture impact, decisions, review requests, findings, milestones, and the events that record their changes — as JSON Schemas.

DCP carries no trust. DCP describes project-state changes only.

DCP never decides, executes, plans, schedules, orchestrates, routes, or authenticates. Think HTTP over TCP:

  ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │  DCP            semantics / validation / corr.│  ← this project
  ├─────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │  Transport      transport / trust / routing   │  ← e.g. AgentixMesh (separate)
  └─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

A DCP message travels inside a transport envelope but is independent of it and independently readable and validatable. Moving between transports is a transport swap, not a rewrite.

What's in a message

Every DCP message is a thin envelope carrying exactly one Event — a recorded change to one entity:

{
  "dcp_version": "1.0",
  "message_id": "msg_01HZ0TASKDONE0001",
  "message_type": "task.completed",
  "issued_at": "2026-06-29T12:30:00Z",
  "correlation_id": "msg_01HZ0TASKCREATED1",
  "body": {
    "event_id": "evt_01HZ0TASKDONE0001",
    "entity_type": "task",
    "verb": "completed",
    "entity_id": "task_schema_validation",
    "attributed_to": "agent-builder",
    "delta": { "status": { "from": "in_progress", "to": "completed" } }
  }
}

The envelope carries only semantic fields (version, ids, type, correlation). Identity, signing, routing, trust, and delivery belong to the transport layer.

The eight entities

Project · Task · Dependency · ArchitectureImpact · Decision · ReviewRequest · Finding · Milestone — plus the Event wrapper that records their changes.

Quickstart

npm install
node reference/validate.mjs examples/v1/task.completed.json   # → PASS
npm test                                                       # examples + conformance + schema-lint

The schemas are language-neutral JSON Schema 2020-12. The Node/Ajv validator under reference/ is one reference implementation; any language can validate DCP. The conformance/ corpus lets any implementation self-certify.

Repository layout

Path	What
SPEC.md	The normative specification.
schemas/v1/	JSON Schemas: envelope, event, eight entities, common types.
examples/v1/	Example messages, one per entity/verb.
conformance/	Language-neutral accept/reject corpus + manifest.json.
reference/	Ajv reference validator (tooling).
docs/	Design principles, SRP boundaries, versioning, extensions, relationships.
tests/	Schema-lint, example validation, conformance runner.
SECURITY.md	The carry-no-trust security model (read before consuming DCP).
GOVERNANCE.md · CONTRIBUTING.md	How the standard is governed and how to contribute.

Scope

DCP is intentionally scoped to project coordination. It may, in the future, become one protocol in a broader family of Agentix protocols — but DCP itself will remain focused on project coordination.

DCP has no dependency on any other system. AgentixMesh is one possible transport; Tokonomix components may produce DCP events; DCP knows about neither. See docs/relationship-to-agentixmesh-and-tokonomix.md.

License

Dual-licensed: Apache-2.0 for code, schemas, examples, conformance, and tests (LICENSE); CC-BY-4.0 for the specification text and docs (LICENSE-docs). See NOTICE.