# Forward Impact

> Agent-aligned engineering standards platform. Define what good engineering
> looks like, generate career paths, AI agent profiles, and team capability
> analysis. Products: Map, Pathway, Guide, Landmark, Summit, Outpost, and
> Gear (shared libraries and services for platform builders).

Forward Impact helps engineering organizations define skills, levels, and
behaviours in a shared agent-aligned engineering standard that humans and
AI agents both use. The data model is YAML-based and drives all products.

## Products

- [Gear](https://www.forwardimpact.team/gear/index.md): Shared libraries and services for platform builders and agents. Gear publishes CLIs, retrieval, evaluation, and infrastructure to npm.
- [Guide](https://www.forwardimpact.team/guide/index.md): Guide grounds career guidance and output review in your organization's engineering standard instead of generic advice.
- [Landmark](https://www.forwardimpact.team/landmark/index.md): Show engineering progress and do not make individuals feel surveilled. Use evidence, trends, and engineer voice grounded in your engineering standard.
- [Map](https://www.forwardimpact.team/map/index.md): Turn implicit engineering expectations into an operational definition. It holds skills, behaviours, levels, and operational signals in plain text.
- [Outpost](https://www.forwardimpact.team/outpost/index.md): Walk into every meeting already oriented. Scheduled AI tasks assemble your context and keep your knowledge organized.
- [Pathway](https://www.forwardimpact.team/pathway/index.md): See the expectations at every level. Generate job definitions, career paths, and agent profiles from one shared engineering standard.
- [Summit](https://www.forwardimpact.team/summit/index.md): See whether a team has the capability to deliver. Get coverage, structural risks, what-if staffing scenarios, and quarterly trajectory.

## Documentation

- [Documentation](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/index.md): Technical documentation for the Forward Impact suite: getting started, guides, reference, and internals.
- [Getting Started](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/getting-started/index.md): Go from zero to your first meaningful result, whether you define standards, explore expectations, or run the codebase.
- [Getting Started: Contributors](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/getting-started/contributors/index.md): Go from a fresh clone to a development environment that works, with synthetic data, checks that pass, and a clear picture of the project structure.
- [Getting Started: Engineers](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/getting-started/engineers/index.md): Go from unfamiliar tools to a clear view of your level, growth guidance grounded in your standard, and a knowledge base that stays current.
- [Getting Started: Guide for Engineers](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/getting-started/engineers/guide/index.md): Set up the AI agent that understands your agent-aligned engineering standard: onboarding, career advice, skill assessment, and contextual help.
- [Getting Started: Landmark for Engineers](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/getting-started/engineers/landmark/index.md): Check your evidence record, promotion readiness, growth timeline, and skill coverage against the markers in your agent-aligned engineering standard.
- [Getting Started: Outpost for Engineers](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/getting-started/engineers/outpost/index.md): Initialize your personal knowledge base, configure background AI tasks, and start the scheduler.
- [Getting Started: Pathway for Engineers](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/getting-started/engineers/pathway/index.md): Browse career paths, generate AI agent teams, and explore job definitions from the CLI and web app.
- [Getting Started: Leaders](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/getting-started/leaders/index.md): Set up the Forward Impact suite for engineering leaders. Define the engineering standard, measure system-level outcomes, and analyze team capability.
- [Getting Started: Landmark for Leaders](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/getting-started/leaders/landmark/index.md): Analyze engineering signals: marker evidence, snapshot trends, practice patterns, team health, and engineer voice.
- [Getting Started: Map for Leaders](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/getting-started/leaders/map/index.md): Initialize your agent-aligned engineering standard, validate against schemas, set up the activity layer, and ingest operational signals.
- [Getting Started: Pathway for Leaders](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/getting-started/leaders/pathway/index.md): Preview your agent-aligned engineering standard in the browser, generate job definitions, and create interview question sets.
- [Getting Started: Summit for Leaders](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/getting-started/leaders/summit/index.md): Model team capability: coverage heatmaps, structural risks, what-if staffing scenarios, growth alignment, and trajectory over time.
- [Internals](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/internals/index.md): How the system works inside: architecture and code for the REPL library, the vector services, operations, and the release process.
- [librepl Internals](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/internals/librepl/index.md): The interactive REPL library: the Repl class, custom commands, state persistence, and CLI interfaces that run interactive or piped.
- [Operations Reference](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/internals/operations/index.md): Environment configuration, service management, and common development tasks for the Forward Impact monorepo.
- [Homebrew Tap Conventions](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/internals/release/index.md): How Forward Impact's Homebrew tap, casks, and Linux formulae stay coherent with the release pipeline.
- [Vector Processing Internals](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/internals/vectors/index.md): The embedding pipeline: TEI installation, native and supervised operation, batch processing, index format, and query-time architecture.
- [Library Guides](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/index.md): These workflow guides cover the shared libraries that give humans and agents the same capabilities. The topics are coordination, interfaces, knowledge, contracts, lifecycle, skill packs, and synthetic environments.
- [Bridge a Threaded Channel to the Agent Team](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/bridge-channels/index.md): Threaded-channel adapters share an intake skeleton, callback registry, durable thread state, and resume-trigger contract. One library serves every channel.
- [Distribute Skill Packs](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/distribute-skill-packs/index.md): Stage a skill pack into APM's .apm/ layout so a bare install pulls skills and agents together. One command turns a source tree into an installable repository.
- [Publish a Skill Discovery Index](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/distribute-skill-packs/discovery-index/index.md): Emit a .well-known/skills/ discovery index so an agent can find and load skills over the web. You get a per-pack index plus a deduplicated index across every pack.
- [Build Tarball and Git-Repo Packs](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/distribute-skill-packs/tarball-distribution/index.md): Build distributable packs in three formats from one set of skill and agent combinations. The formats are a flat tarball, an APM tarball, and a static bare git repo. Output is byte-identical across runs.
- [Give Agents and Humans the Same Interface](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/every-surface/index.md): Capabilities that work on every surface. One presenter, one contract, and one formatter serve both the CLI and the web. You build no separate integrations.
- [Add a Capability to Both Surfaces](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/every-surface/add-capability/index.md): Ship a feature to terminal and browser at once. One presenter and one registration cover both surfaces.
- [Build a Web Surface with libui](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/every-surface/build-web-surface/index.md): Assemble the browser side of a shared capability. Use components, reactive state, a global store, routes, slide decks, and an error boundary. A bad page then does not blank the whole app.
- [Build an Interactive REPL](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/every-surface/interactive-repl/index.md): Give humans and agents the same exploratory loop. One command set works at the prompt and as one-shot flags. State survives between sessions.
- [Publish a Documentation Site](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/every-surface/publish-docs/index.md): Turn a directory of markdown into a static site agents and humans can both navigate. You get directory-style URLs, a companion markdown file for every page, and auto-generated llms.txt, sitemap, table of contents, and breadcrumbs.
- [Render Templates with Project Overrides](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/every-surface/render-templates/index.md): Ship default templates with a package and let each project override any one of them. Two-tier Mustache resolution keeps generated output consistent across surfaces.
- [Generate a Synthetic Dataset](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/generate-dataset/index.md): Go from a DSL file to a complete, validated evaluation dataset. The pipeline generates entities, resolves prose, renders output, and verifies results.
- [Give Agents Typed, Retrievable Knowledge](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/ground-agents/index.md): Agents answer relationship questions, look up context, and find related content. Typed knowledge infrastructure backs them, and it needs no external engines.
- [Look Up Context Fast](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/ground-agents/lookup-context/index.md): Retrieve exactly the context you need from a JSONL-backed index. Prefix, limit, and token-budget filters give you a subset. You do not load everything into memory.
- [Query a Knowledge Graph](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/ground-agents/query-graph/index.md): Answer relationship questions from an RDF graph index with triple patterns and type-filtered subject lists. You need no join logic and no SPARQL endpoint.
- [Resolve a Resource](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/ground-agents/resolve-resource/index.md): Give agents rich, typed context from a resource identifier. They get provenance, access control, and RDF content instead of raw files.
- [Search Semantically](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/ground-agents/search-semantically/index.md): Find related content by meaning instead of by keyword. A vector index returns ranked results, and you deploy no vector database.
- [Turn Standard Definitions into Queryable Data](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/integrate-standard/index.md): Engineering standard YAML becomes queryable data. Derive skill matrices, behaviour profiles, and agent configurations programmatically from a single load.
- [Derive a Skill Matrix or Agent Profile](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/integrate-standard/derive-profile/index.md): Go from discipline, level, and track to a complete skill matrix or agent profile. You do not parse YAML by hand.
- [Manage Service Lifecycle from One Interface](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/service-lifecycle/index.md): Keep services running and surface problems before they escalate. One interface gives you supervision and observability.
- [Add Observability](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/service-lifecycle/add-observability/index.md): Add structured, machine-readable logs and spans without a logging framework. Drop in a log line or a span and it works.
- [Start, Stop, or Check a Service](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/service-lifecycle/manage-service/index.md): Start, stop, restart, check status, and read logs through one interface. You do not need to remember each service's specific command.
- [The Substrate Contract](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/substrate-contract/index.md): Provision identities, pick personas, and issue credentials on any Supabase-backed stack. To do this, implement three views in a substrate schema. You need no Forward Impact data model.
- [Keep Types Synced with Proto Definitions](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/typed-contracts/index.md): Proto changes flow through to JavaScript types, MCP tools, and service endpoints automatically. One source of truth runs from definition to runtime.
- [Expose a Proto Method as an Agent Tool](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/typed-contracts/expose-tool/index.md): A new gRPC method becomes an agent tool with one config entry. You write no glue code and no hand-written schema.
- [Ship a Service Endpoint](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/typed-contracts/ship-endpoint/index.md): Ship a gRPC service with typed contracts, authentication, retries, and health checks. You do not reimplement the transport.
- [Ship an HTTP Service Endpoint](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/libraries/typed-contracts/ship-http-endpoint/index.md): Mount Hono routes on a configured app and call start(). You get security headers, a health check, body limits, and graceful shutdown with no extra code.
- [Product Guides](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/index.md): Workflow guides for leaders and engineers. Each guide starts from a real situation and ends with an outcome grounded in your organization's engineering standard.
- [Configure Agents to Meet Your Engineering Standard](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/agent-teams/index.md): End the cycle where you reject agent output that follows generic practices. Configure agents to meet the expectations the organization holds for humans.
- [Give Agents Organizational Context](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/agent-teams/organizational-context/index.md): Keep agents aligned as your engineering standard evolves. The guidance stays clear and free of conflicts, and you reconcile nothing by hand.
- [Authoring Agent-Aligned Engineering Standards](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/authoring-standards/index.md): Turn 'good engineering' into an operational definition so evaluations start from a shared foundation instead of private mental models.
- [Define a New Role](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/authoring-standards/define-role/index.md): Move from a blank slate to a well-structured role definition. Build it from existing disciplines and tracks, then customize it to fit.
- [Validate and Update the Standard](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/authoring-standards/update-standard/index.md): Update your engineering standard. Validation catches structural mistakes before the team adopts the change.
- [See What's Expected at Your Level](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/career-paths/index.md): Stop the guesswork about what your level requires. See the skills, behaviours, and scope so expectations are clear before your next review.
- [Understand Autonomy and Scope](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/career-paths/autonomy-scope/index.md): Understand what independence, decision-making authority, and complexity look like at your level, so scope conversations start from shared definitions.
- [List Engineering Data Sources](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/engineering-data-sources/index.md): List the activity rows Landmark retains about you and see when they fall off the retention window.
- [Demonstrate Engineering Progress](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/engineering-outcomes/index.md): Walk into a quarterly review with system-level trends, marker evidence, and engineer voice. Demonstrate progress and do not single out individuals.
- [Tell Whether Culture Investments Are Working](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/engineering-outcomes/culture-investments/index.md): Track an initiative's impact on engineering outcomes. Read driver-score trends across the snapshots that straddle its completion date. Assemble a readout that withstands VP scrutiny.
- [Get Career Guidance Grounded in the Standard](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/growth-areas/index.md): A promotion conversation ended with 'not yet' and no specifics. Use Guide and Landmark to find what is missing and show concrete evidence of growth.
- [Check Progress Toward Next Level](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/growth-areas/check-progress/index.md): See whether recent engineering work shows visible movement toward the next level. Review your readiness checklist and growth timeline.
- [Ask a Growth Question](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/growth-areas/growth-question/index.md): Get growth advice grounded in your organization's actual skill and behaviour definitions instead of generic career guidance.
- [Issue Service-Account Tokens](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/issuing-service-account-tokens/index.md): Mint long-lived Supabase JWTs for unattended agents that take on a service-account identity in Landmark.
- [Keep Track of Context Without Effort](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/knowledge-systems/index.md): Outpost maintains awareness of people, projects, and threads in the background. You do not walk into a meeting cold.
- [Walk Into Every Meeting Already Oriented](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/knowledge-systems/meeting-prep/index.md): Walk into any meeting already oriented. Outpost assembles attendee context, open items, and talking points before you sit down.
- [Provision Engineer Auth Users](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/provisioning-engineers/index.md): Reconcile Supabase Auth users against the activity roster so identity-derived row-level security works.
- [Sign In to Landmark](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/signing-in-to-landmark/index.md): Sign in with a Supabase magic-link so Landmark commands resolve your identity. You do not manage a long-lived token.
- [Make Staffing Decisions You Can Defend](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/team-capability/index.md): Replace staffing intuition with evidence: coverage heatmaps, structural risks, and what-if scenarios that show what each role requires.
- [Evaluate a Candidate Against Team Gaps](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/team-capability/evaluate-candidate/index.md): Know whether a candidate fills the team's actual capability gap before you make an offer. Do not discover the mismatch after the new hire starts.
- [Surface Capability Gaps](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/team-capability/surface-gaps/index.md): See capability gaps before they become incidents. Summit shows structural risks, coverage trends, and growth opportunities.
- [Get Output Review Grounded in the Standard](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/trust-output/index.md): Catch convention violations that look correct on the surface. Review agent output against your engineering standard. Do not read every line.
- [See What the Standard Expects Before Reviewing](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/trust-output/expected-output/index.md): Know what to check before you start a review: the skill proficiencies, behaviour maturities, and expectations your standard defines for the role.
- [Get a Second Opinion on a Deliverable](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/products/trust-output/second-opinion/index.md): Know what meets the bar and what falls short before you approve. Your engineering standard grounds the assessment. Intuition does not.
- [Reference](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/reference/index.md): Find the exact command, entity shape, lifecycle phase, or YAML field you need. You do not have to read an end-to-end guide.
- [Lifecycle](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/reference/lifecycle/index.md): Engineering lifecycle phases, with workflow guidance for handoffs, constraints, and checklists.
- [Core Model](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/reference/model/index.md): How disciplines, levels, tracks, skills, and behaviours combine to produce complete role definitions.
- [YAML Schema Reference](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/reference/yaml-schema/index.md): File format reference for every entity type, with examples and links to published JSON Schema and RDF/SHACL definitions.
- [Service Guides](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/index.md): Workflow guides for the shared gRPC services. They cover conversation bridges, knowledge and search, standard queries, agent tools, and span collection.
- [Bridge Microsoft Teams to the Agent Team](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/bridge-conversations/index.md): Stand up the msbridge service so a Teams mention dispatches an agent session and the verdict posts back to the same thread.
- [Dispatch an Agent Session From a Teams Mention](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/bridge-conversations/dispatch-from-chat/index.md): Trace what happens between a bot mention in Teams and the verdict reply posted back to the same thread.
- [Bridge GitHub Discussions to the Agent Team](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/bridge-discussions/index.md): Stand up the ghbridge service so a new discussion or comment dispatches an agent session and the lead's replies post back to the same thread.
- [Resume a Recessed RFC When a Trigger Fires](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/bridge-discussions/resume-recessed/index.md): Trace the suspend/resume contract. A `recessed` verdict persists a trigger, accumulates replies, and re-dispatches with `resume_context` when the trigger fires.
- [Collect Spans from Any Product](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/collect-spans/index.md): Products emit spans and do not manage storage. One shared span gRPC service collects them.
- [Send Spans from a Product](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/collect-spans/send-spans/index.md): Emit spans and query them immediately, with no storage infrastructure to manage.
- [Embed Text Using a Shared Service](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/embed-text/index.md): Fetch embeddings from one shared gRPC service that runs Text Embeddings Inference, and do not manage inference infrastructure.
- [Embed a Batch of Strings in One Call](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/embed-text/embed-batch/index.md): Send a batch of input strings to the embedding service and read back vectors in order with one gRPC call and no per-input HTTP overhead.
- [Traverse Knowledge and Search Semantically](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/ground-agents/index.md): Query relationships and search content through shared graph and vector gRPC services, with no per-product stores.
- [Answer Relationship Questions from a Product](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/ground-agents/query-graph/index.md): Answer relationship questions from any product. Send triple patterns to the shared graph service and write no join logic.
- [Search for Related Content from a Product](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/ground-agents/search-content/index.md): Find related content by meaning from any product. The shared vector service manages the embeddings, so your product stores none.
- [Query the Engineering Standard from Any Product](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/integrate-standard/index.md): Products access derived roles and profiles through the shared pathway gRPC service and do not embed derivation logic.
- [Fetch a Derived Role or Agent Profile](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/integrate-standard/fetch-profile/index.md): Get a derived role or agent profile and do not reimplement the derivation. Pass coordinates to the pathway service and receive Turtle RDF.
- [Expose Backend Services as Agent Tools](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/typed-contracts/index.md): Every gRPC endpoint becomes an agent tool from a single configuration file, with no per-endpoint integration code.
- [Add a Service to the MCP Surface](https://www.forwardimpact.team/docs/services/typed-contracts/add-service/index.md): A new gRPC service becomes agent-accessible with one registration and no integration code.

## Optional

- [Forward Impact Engineering](https://www.forwardimpact.team/index.md): An open-source suite with one idea at its core. Define your engineering standard once, then derive roles, agent profiles, career guidance, measurement, and staffing from it.
- [About](https://www.forwardimpact.team/about/index.md): Why Forward Impact Engineering exists, and the philosophy behind how we empower engineers to do their best work.