Lean Artifact Metadata & Summary Density Protocol

Overview

When agents create or update living markdown artifacts (implementation_plan.md, walkthrough.md, architecture_rfc.md), tools require an ArtifactMetadata dictionary payload.

Unoptimized agents generate 150 to 300 words of conversational meta-commentary inside the Summary field ("In this artifact, I have thoroughly documented all of the comprehensive steps that we are going to take during the implementation phase of our refactoring project...").

Because artifact metadata is passed in tool arguments and re-indexed into agent context, verbose summaries burn hundreds of tokens per artifact mutation turn.

The Lean Artifact Metadata Protocol enforces dense 1-to-2 sentence summary definitions focusing strictly on content purpose while eliminating rhetorical padding.

Verbose Metadata vs. Lean High-Density Schema