> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.mindlab.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# CADANCE™ Specification

> A deep dive into the CADANCE™ Specification, the declarative heart of the MindLab platform.

The core philosophy of the MindLab platform is **"Configuration-first."** We believe that for AI to be a trusted, enterprise-grade asset, its behavior must be deterministic, repeatable, and auditable. This cannot be achieved through prompting alone.

This is why we created the CADANCE™ Spec, a single, versioned specification that declaratively defines the entire lifecycle of an AI-driven workflow. It is a human-readable, machine-executable contract that ensures every action taken by the system is traceable, reproducible, and aligned with your explicit intent.

### The 7 Components of the CADANCE™ Spec

CADANCE™ is an acronym for the seven core components of the specification:

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="Config">
    Defines the high-level objectives, success criteria, and operational budgets (cost, latency, SLOs) for the workflow.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Agents">
    Specifies the roles, capabilities, constraints, and escalation paths for the specialist agents involved in the workflow.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Data">
    Declares the knowledge sources, memory scopes, data contracts, and citation requirements for the workflow.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Analysis">
    Defines the output templates, evaluation rubrics, and schemas that the agents must adhere to.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Norms">
    Specifies the policies, governance rules, approval requirements, and human-in-the-loop (HITL) checkpoints for the workflow.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Controls">
    Defines the state graphs, retry/timeout logic, gating conditions, and deterministic seeds for the workflow's execution.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Execution">
    Specifies the runbooks, handoffs, logging levels, artifact retention policies, and audit requirements for the workflow.
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>