The charter

Twelve koans in four triads. The triads govern what the language believes (truth), what it refuses to lose (loss), what it looks like (form), and what it is allowed to become (growth).

The test a koan must pass. A koan earns its place only if it decides novel questions identically in two designers’ hands. A principle that merely describes the build is documentation wearing a koan’s clothes; it is not a koan. Each koan below is stated, given its meaning, shown what it settles, and — where the koan is load-bearing on questions the build has not yet met — worked against a genuinely novel decision. The worked decisions are the test, run.

The decision ledger (decisions.md) outranks this charter. Where they disagree, the ledger wins.

Triad I — truth

1. Claims come from somewhere.

Meaning. A claim’s authority is its origin — authored by whom, ruled by what, assumed under which question. Nothing is true by being written down, and no origin can be manufactured after the fact.

It settles. There is no status field in the AST; a bare ratified cannot parse; derived atoms cannot be hand-annotated; citations render from the same polynomial that gates assertion.

A novel decision it makes — the wiki migration. When an old worldbuilding wiki is imported, its ten thousand claims arrive proposed with origin imported-from(wiki, page, rev). An import records where claims came from and cannot mint authority, however trusted the source, because “trusted” is a valuation only a ruling can make. The same answer holds for claims an LLM extracts from old drafts.

Why here. Provenance drift is the repo pathology, and accumulated consequences accumulate in the story; the language believes what the canon believes.

2. Nothing changes but a ruling.

Meaning. The evaluated world changes only when a declared decision changes its valuation; every other operation — forks, sims, imports, repairs, tools — is exploration over an unchanged store. Koan 2 bounds what change is; koan 3 bounds what the engine may claim about the caller that declared it.

It settles. There is no delete opcode; supersession keeps lineage; forks are O(1); cutting an episode is a valuation flip plus a re-fold, not an erasure.

A novel decision it makes — the rename request. A contributor asks for deloreis rename glass-weald glaswold as an in-place operation across the corpus. The koan refuses the shape and dictates the correct one: a rename is a supersession — the new name ruled in, the old name dying into lineage and the killed-token registry, every claim’s history intact. There is no edit that changes the past quietly; there is only a ruling that changes the future visibly.

Why here. The author’s practice is already massively forked; the koan turns that workflow into the semantics.

3. The engine never decides canon.

Meaning. The engine records, checks, renders, and explains declared claims; it does not decide who is entitled to approve them or what an application calls canon. A caller supplies attribution and decision state. The engine checks the structure and the cited decision’s existence; the consuming application owns authorization, review, and policy.

It settles. The auto-fill trial still cannot turn a model completion into a verdict by itself. But the engine does not refuse a citation because of the caller’s identity: it records supplied attribution and resolved decision state as data (DL-0054, DL-0058).

Why here. The honest deck is a tool for the mind, never a hidden governor of the people using it. Its boundary is epistemic: it verifies what it can observe and never invents social authority it cannot observe.

Triad II — loss

4. Nothing is silently dropped.

Meaning. No input is discarded without a record. Off-interface input, unknown keywords, unhandled cases — each surfaces as a graded finding, never a silent loss.

It settles. Forward-compatibility against unknown-keyword tolerance: an unrecognized construct is a diagnosed finding, not a swallowed line. The bounded interface (koan 11) limits what is supported; it never authorizes a silent drop.

Why here. The gate is total by design; what the language refuses to lose is the first thing the loss triad protects.

5. An open question is a debt.

Meaning. An undecided fork is not a blank; it is an obligation the system carries and surfaces until it is ruled or retired.

It settles. question/option declarations are tracked debts; a waiting candidate is filed as a ruling request and surfaced for the author, never held in memory.

Why here. This is the koan where the language’s ethics and the world’s Frith are literally the same law: a debt named is a debt that cannot be quietly forgotten.

6. A verdict never outranks its evidence.

Meaning. A conclusion is only as strong as the weakest procedure it rests on. A grade is a claim about recheckability, and it cannot be laundered upward.

It settles. The verdict lattice (checked > tested > attested > asserted); weakest-grade rollup over the procedure chain; replayable judgments. A Monte-Carlo result never reports checked; a model attestation never reports tested.

Why here. Grading honesty is what keeps the whole apparatus trustworthy; this koan governs grading and rollup, and its growth-side cousin — reimplement for checkability, borrow only baselines — lives in koan 12.

Triad III — form

7. One way to write it.

Meaning. For each thing sayable, there is exactly one canonical way to say it. No synonyms, no positional shorthands, no second syntax regime waiting in the expert tier.

It settles. The closed keyword vocabulary; the single canonical rendering, formatter-defined and gate-enforced; non-canonical text legal as input, never as repo state.

Why here. Koan 7 governs the text; its cousin, koan 11, governs the paths in. Seven keeps the writing predictable; eleven keeps the agent interface coherent.

8. The wheel refuses rank.

Meaning. Some sorts are cyclic, and a cycle has no first and no largest. The type system honors that: a wheel sort carries succ, pred, across, and distance, but no <, no sort order, and no maximum.

It settles. The single wheel sort shared by cyclic time (tide, moon, season); asking for the “greatest” season or sorting the moon’s nights is a type error, not a silent tie-break.

Why here. Stories can have cycles, and a language that faked a linear order over them would misrepresent the world it models.

9. Errors are lore.

Meaning. A diagnostic is part of the world’s record, spoken in the world’s terms. Errors are first-class output, authored with the same care as any other surface.

It settles. Diagnostics speak the domain, never PL-speak — a missing ruling, a ward made at the wrong hour, a season with no first — and each is a designed, snapshot-tested artifact.

Why here. The error ladder is most of what a writer meets day to day; if the errors are noise, the language is hostile, and the loss triad has failed at the surface.

Triad IV — growth

Truth, loss, and form govern what the language is; growth governs what it is allowed to become — which interfaces are supported, which components are owned, which targets are served.

10. One fabric.

Meaning. All knowledge in a declared corpus — including geography, magic, names, story-time, and games — lives in one runtime under one semantics. No satellite knowledge systems; integration is by declaration, not by API. If a thing is knowledge in the corpus, it is declarations in the fabric; if it is not, it consumes exports.

It settles. The timeline is a module of the fabric, not a separate authority; the naming view is generated from the compiled world rather than maintained as a sibling source. Exports render claims but do not introduce new canon.

A novel decision it makes — the export variant. A new fictional variant belongs in the world as a declaration with standing and provenance. An export profile can render that variant, but cannot silently define it.

Why here. The repo has lived the alternative — hand-maintained mirrors that drift, prose shadowing data, an apparatus built to chase divergence. One fabric is that lesson as law: divergence is prevented by having nothing to diverge.

11. One way in.

Meaning. Agents author lore through the semantic tools against the server; people may also write and import .dli text. Both use the same underlying lore model and shared kernel checks. Callers may declare attribution and decision state; the consuming application determines what that declaration authorizes.

It settles. The semantic tools are the supported agent interface, and .dli is a supported text authoring and reading surface (DL-0101). Stored fact objects remain canonical. Raw AST emission is an internal mechanism, not a taught agent interface.

A novel decision it makes — the form-editor question. A click-to-edit lore interface can be a client of the semantic tools. It supplies attribution and standing as data; the consuming application owns its review policy.

Why here. The sibling projects paid for it — path count predicted failure surface better than path quality.

12. Own what certifies; borrow only baselines.

Meaning. Anything whose verdict gates canon is small, owned, deterministic, and replayable; foreign components may propose candidates or serve as outrun baselines, never certify. Growth proceeds by small owned parts linked at the judgment boundary, and every owned part inherits the testing bill — property tests, differential oracles — as the price of checkability.

It settles. The vacated CP-SAT and clingo seats and the two-stage flip conditions; clingo’s retained role as a lab-side differential oracle; zero foreign reasoning processes through the medium term.

A novel decision it makes — the good-crate question. A mature Rust datalog crate appears that could replace the evaluator at half the code. Adopt? No for the certifying evaluator — a foreign fixpoint cannot certify, and forking it to host the annotation algebra yields ownership in the worst form: owned bugs, borrowed architecture. Yes as a baseline — run it as a differential oracle over the shared datalog fragment. One paragraph decides it, which is what having the koan is for.

Why here. The demonstrated ecosystem ethic of the sibling projects — a verifier posture, a differential pattern — stated as law rather than habit.

The tiebreak, and the budget

Every mechanism argues from a demonstrated lore requirement; the tripwires are contractual. When koans genuinely deadlock, the order is truth outranks loss outranks form outranks growth — form exists to prevent loss, loss-prevention exists to protect authorship, and growth exists to keep all three enforceable over time, never to enlarge the system for its own sake. Within a deadlock, the resolution that preserves replayable attribution wins first; at equal attribution, the resolution that adds less wins — less language, and explicitly fewer interfaces, fewer seats, fewer parts.

The budget has named lines:

• Interface count — one: the declarative tool surface. Authority boundaries, not entry doors, distinguish authors (DL-0043).
• Foreign certifiers — zero, with one rented baseline.
• Export targets — earn maintained profiles only from demonstrated consumers.

Principles in tension

The charter names its costs; a charter that names none has not been used.

• Single-form versus sugar. One canonical way to write it (koan 7) versus the ergonomics a writer would gain from shorthands. Resolved toward the single form: the formatter absorbs sloppiness on save, so the writer’s convenience is paid at input time, not by a second surface.
• The budget versus the timeline machinery. The size budget pushes features out; first-class story-time pulls a partial-order module, fluents, and wheels in. Resolved by demonstrated requirement: each timeline feature answers a named corpus failure, and nothing speculative rides along.
• Strictness versus the sketching writer. A total gate versus a writer who wants to jot incomplete notes. Resolved by proposed-first authoring: incompleteness is a first-class state (proposed, open question) rather than an error, so sketching is legal and never silently lost.
• Domain errors versus machine output. Errors that speak the domain (koan 9) versus errors that a machine emitter or a benchmark can parse. Resolved by the two-channel error model: findings carry a stable machine-readable class and a domain-spoken message; neither is sacrificed to the other.
• One fabric versus a small system. One fabric pulls all knowledge into one runtime; the budget pushes everything out. Resolved by scope: one fabric governs semantics — all knowledge, one meaning, one store — not code shape. The kernel, the timeline module, and any future searcher are separate small parts sharing the judgment boundary (koan 12). A monolith is not what one fabric means; satellite semantics is not what small parts means.
• One way in versus nothing silently dropped. The semantic tools and the supported text surface must not silently discard input. Both use shared kernel checks and report findings; agents use the semantic tool interface.

The trials

Three worked decisions test the charter end to end.

1. Bare ratified cannot parse. A status with no origin is a claim from nowhere; koan 1 refuses it at the grammar. The AST has no status slot to fill, so the refusal is structural, not a lint.
2. A proposed conflict is surfaced. Two proposed values for a declared functional slot raise a warning. Nothing is dropped (koan 4), and neither account becomes canon without a ruling (koan 2). The author can record an open question (koan 5); the warning does not block materialization.
3. The write-back refusal. A studio consuming the video-game export asks for deloreis export --write-back, so their tool can push edited entity fields home. Koan 10: integration is by declaration — an external tool’s database is not the fabric. Koan 1: “the tool’s current field value” is not an origin with authority. Koan 3: the engine cannot decide whether the studio’s tool is authorized to alter canon. Koan 11: if the studio’s writers need in, they come through the same tool surface as every author; their application records the review and decision state it requires. Four koans, one paragraph: the write-back flag is refused because it bypasses the fabric, and the honest path is offered.

A parked koan candidate

Noted for a future charter revision, not adopted here: “The model’s word is evidence about the work, never support for the world.” It states the boundary that keeps attestations out of the support polynomials (decisions.md DL-0006). The charter holds twelve koans; this candidate waits for its demonstrated need, per the budget.