A vault charter is the constitution of one thinking place. It is a schema file at the root of an Obsidian vault. It tells any agent that opens the folder how this vault works: its purpose, its page law, its categories, and what may cross to the Commons.
Law divides between two levels. Farm grammar holds everywhere: how pages are written, how titles are chosen, how links work. The charter is the local dialect of one vault. It may tighten the farm grammar. It may never contradict it.
The three gardener operations live in the charter, not in any one agent's toolkit. Ingest, query and lint are written down as procedures of the place. Any capable agent becomes a disciplined maintainer the moment it opens the vault.
The charter keeps two companions. An index lists every note by category, so the vault can be navigated without search. A log records every operation, append-only, so the vault's evolution reads like a story.
The first charter goes to the Game of 42 vault. That vault has been writing wiki-grammar notes all along, so its rules will be absorbed, not imposed.
# See - Memex Gardener and The Thinking Lab - Fork Across Borders