The Shared Schema
Personal AI stacks do not have to become identical to work together. They need a common way to name what matters when their private methods meet.
01 / the coordination problem
Private capability needs a public edge.
A shared schema is a small common language for describing sources, decisions, responsibilities, and handoffs so that different personal stacks can cooperate without exposing or standardizing the methods inside them.
App People often inherited this language from the software itself. Everyone used the same customer record, status field, approval route, and report. The system was limiting, but it supplied a shared grammar. A person could change the wording of an email or add judgment around the edges, yet the work arrived in recognizable boxes.
Stack People can work with more variation. One person may keep trusted research sources, another may use a careful intake ritual, and a third may have a distinctive way of testing a claim before making a recommendation. That range is part of the point. A personal stack should be able to become more capable because it reflects its owner’s craft, context, and accumulated learning.
The shared schema is not a demand that every stack work the same way. It is an agreement that the parts of work other people must rely on will be named in the same way.
Without that edge, freedom can become friction. A colleague receives a polished result but cannot tell whether it is a proposal, a decision, a verified fact, or a draft that needs an owner. A team begins to mistake stylistic confidence for completion because each person’s private method has a different invisible finish line.
02 / three coordinates
Name the thing before asking a stack to move it.
The useful categories are not a universal taxonomy. They are a compact social interface: enough structure to let different capabilities coordinate, not so much that a team replaces judgment with labels.
What supports this?
Mark the difference between a supplied source, a working assumption, a generated proposal, and a claim that someone has checked. A fast stack can draft across those boundaries; shared work cannot afford to blur them.
What is decided?
Separate an option from an authorization. Record the decision owner, the condition that would reopen it, and the point at which a recommendation became a commitment.
What travels next?
Describe the artifact, its audience, its limits, and the next accountable person. A handoff is not a transfer of every private context; it is a clear statement of what another person may safely rely on.
03 / a practical agreement
The organization owns the agreement, not the whole stack.
This distinction matters for both sides. An organization has a legitimate need for dependable shared work. It can establish authoritative systems, define what counts as verification, name who can make a consequential decision, and require a usable handoff. Those are collective commitments. They protect clients, coworkers, and the institution itself.
That does not entitle the organization to treat a person’s complete operating environment as a new form of corporate inventory. The source habits, notes, experiments, and internal patterns that make someone unusually good at a job may be personal capability. A healthy arrangement asks for a public account of the shared claim, not surveillance of every private step.
The same limit helps Stack People. If a personal system cannot translate its work into a shared schema, it may be clever but it is difficult to trust. The person should be able to say: these are the sources I relied on; this part is a proposal; this is the decision that remains yours; this is what the next person can use without guessing.
That is a different ambition from restoring the old application. The goal is not to force every method back into one rigid route. It is to make varied methods composable where they touch other people’s obligations. Coordination becomes an act of translation rather than an act of surrender.
Open a shared-schema handoff
Before sending work onward, state four things: the evidence state, the decision state, the accountable owner, and the artifact the next person may rely on. Add the material uncertainty if one remains. Keep the private mechanics private unless they are necessary to inspect the claim itself.