I've created the updated Strategic Directions document at `STRATEGIC_DIRECTIONS.md`. Here's a summary:

## Key Findings

**Landscape Overview:**
- The space has stratified into three tiers: foundation orchestrators (crewAI, AutoGen), full-stack autonomous devs (OpenHands, Cline, Aider), and persona/memory systems (gstack, mem0, OpenClaw)
- The hottest trend is **persona-driven specialization** — gstack's 15-persona setup proves focused roles outperform generic agents

**8 Projects Worth Studying (all verified via GitHub API):**
1. **OpenClaw** (328K stars) - Skills Registry extensibility model
2. **gstack** (33K stars) - Garry Tan's opinionated personas, direct ColonyOS inspiration
3. **OpenHands** (69K stars) - Sandboxed Docker execution + SWE-bench evaluation
4. **Cline** (59K stars) - Best-in-class permission UX for human oversight
5. **AutoGen** (56K stars) - Multi-agent conversation modeling
6. **mem0** (51K stars) - Episodic vs semantic memory stratification
7. **crewAI** (47K stars) - Role-based Agent → Task → Crew hierarchies
8. **Aider** (42K stars) - Repo maps for context management

**Key Patterns:**
- Persona specialization beats general agents
- Memory stratification (episodic + semantic) is non-negotiable at scale
- Skills/Tools as extension points enables ecosystem growth
- Sandboxing unlocks true autonomy

**Watch Out For:**
- Context window exhaustion (solved by repo maps)
- Agent sprawl without clear decision-makers
- Demo-ware that fails on real codebases

The document includes the user's North Star verbatim and positions ColonyOS within this landscape.