RECIPE FORMAT

ORC File Format Primer

The Open Recipe Container (ORC) is Meridian's portable bundle format for shipping reproducible agent recipes. It packages prompts, tool manifests, model routes, and verification gates into a single content-addressed archive that any Meridian-compatible runtime can execute deterministically.

1.Container Layout

An ORC file is a zstd-compressed tar archive with a fixed top-level layout. The manifest pins every dependency by SHA-256 digest, so two runs with the same ORC always resolve to byte-identical inputs.

recipe.orc/
  manifest.json     # name, version, digests
  prompts/          # markdown templates
  tools/            # JSON Schema tool defs
  routes.yaml       # model routing rules
  gates/            # verifier scripts
  README.md

2.Manifest Contract

Every ORC must declare a manifest with a stable schema version, a human-readable name, a semver string, and a digest table covering every file the runtime will load. Unknown top-level keys are rejected by the loader to keep recipes forward-compatible without silent drift.

•schema — pinned at meridian.orc/v1
•entry — relative path to the root prompt
•digests — map of path to SHA-256

3.Loading and Verification

On load, the runtime streams the archive, recomputes every digest, and refuses to execute if any entry diverges from the manifest. The verifier runs before the first model call, so a tampered ORC never reaches a paid inference path. Gates under gates/ run after each step and can short-circuit a recipe that drifts off-policy.