The seam with the sibling crickets toolkit — agentm owns the durable state substrate and memory engine the phases run on; crickets' development-lifecycle plugin owns the phase loop itself, plus the skills, agents, and hooks that ride on it, and neither requires the other.

agentm is the memory-engine substrate; crickets is the toolkit that ships the phase-gated workflow (/plan · /work · /review · /release · /bugfix) and the customizations that run inside it. The two are siblings, not layers — each ships and versions independently, and neither requires the other to be installed. Since the V5 unbundling, crickets' development-lifecycle plugin owns the phases and their canonical specs; agentm owns the on-disk state layout and memory engine those phases read and write.

The seam is graceful-skip in both directions, so each side works alone:

Direction	Mechanism
development-lifecycle → other crickets plugins	a phase spec suggests a sibling crickets primitive (e.g. /release suggests ship-release) and graceful-skips when it's absent.
crickets → agentm	development-lifecycle' phases read and write agentm's on-disk state layout (.harness/PLAN.md, progress.md) and call into the memory engine; both graceful-skip when agentm isn't installed.

Because the dependency is soft in every direction, a bare agentm memory engine runs with no phase loop installed, and the phase loop goes quiet on a project with no memory-engine state to read. Neither hard-wires to the other.

• Phases — the surface crickets enhances. The harness defines the phase contract; crickets primitives compose onto it through the soft seam.
• Host adapters — crickets primitives install per host through the same adapter destinations the harness uses.

Detail:

• Product intent · How the pieces fit — what the harness is, and where the toolkit sits beside it.
• Foundations HLD — crickets split — the decision that drew this seam.
• crickets wiki ↗ — the toolkit's own documentation, from the other side of the seam.

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