Decision ledger

This ledger outranks the other project documents. Append new decisions with the next sequential DL number, a date, an attribution (machine or human), and a ruling, a short rationale, and a revisit trigger when applicable. Corrections are new entries. The reset below is the one authorized exception to the earlier append-only history; subsequent entries are append-only.

DL-0104 — Standing rulings carried forward from pre-fiction-reset

Date: 2026-11-02

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. DL-0101 authorizes replacing the old ledger with this readable continuation. The still-applicable engine and project obligations of the rulings listed below remain binding, including their qualifications and exceptions, except where a later ruling supersedes them. These summaries are navigation, not permission to discard a surviving detail. The earlier text is available with git show pre-fiction-reset:docs/decisions.md; DL-0102 and DL-0103 were recorded later and are available with git show 8c73720:docs/decisions.md. Retired consumer-specific work, obsolete contract-version promises, the abandoned evaluation program, and the retired cutover are not carried forward.

• DL-0001: The project is De Lore Is; text uses .dli, the executable is deloreis, and worker operations use dli.*.
• DL-0002: The charter is constitutional; resolve koan conflicts by truth, loss, form, then growth.
• DL-0003, as amended by DL-0041 and DL-0101: Schemas derive from Rust types; fact objects and their canonical JCS bytes are authoritative, with supported text as a rendering and authoring surface.
• DL-0005: Canon-certifying judgments are owned, deterministic, offline, and replayable; foreign tools do not silently certify canon.
• DL-0006: Grades are checked > tested > attested > asserted; support and grade remain distinct, and chains roll up at their weakest grade.
• DL-0008: Keep the hand-built parser, typed schemas, domain diagnostics, and the project’s chosen small tooling stack.
• DL-0009: Keep phases pure and invocation-local; do not make a stateful compiler a prerequisite for incremental evaluation.
• DL-0011: The ledger outranks documents; docs and the skill have status and verdict, IDs are minted in the ledger, and the documentation tree stays flat.
• DL-0013: Gating lanes are deterministic and offline; external or nondeterministic experiments do not block the language gate.
• DL-0014, as amended by DL-0043 and DL-0054: Agents author lore using the server’s semantic authoring tools; authority and review policy belong to the caller.
• DL-0015: cargo xtask gate is the canonical compiled CI-parity gate.
• DL-0016: Surface names describe their behavior; retired forms are registered and refused with their successor.
• DL-0019: The cyclic timing proof finding is proof.wrong-phase.
• DL-0020 and DL-0024: World rules support typed bodies and stratified not; negation carries valuation-neutral, theory-respecting defeat rather than treating an open counterclaim as absent.
• DL-0023: Authoring reads inspect the staged world without mutating it and report structured findings.
• DL-0025: The canonical formatter is comment-free; teaching commentary lives outside canonical text.
• DL-0029, as qualified by DL-0079: Accepted syntax has semantics or an honest diagnostic; explicitly ruled inert forms retain their recorded dispositions.
• DL-0030: Advertise a capability only when its documented runtime and durability semantics are implemented.
• DL-0037, as amended by DL-0101: Keep the generic context, articy, CSV, and static-wiki exports, with validated profiles and containment of hostile text.
• DL-0039: Proof selection is explicit when ambiguous, and quoted claims retain their intended term form.
• DL-0041: The content-addressed lorestore is canonical; deterministic reconstruction, schemas, offline checks, and checked documentation examples remain part of the contract.
• DL-0042: The old line-count budget and its gate are retired; the remaining architectural constraints still apply.
• DL-0043, as amended by DL-0054 and DL-0101: Semantic tools provide the common agent interface; text is supported, and the engine does not decide caller authorization.
• DL-0044 and DL-0045: Stage declarations as fact objects per mutation; materialize is acceptance, reconstruction is total or refuses, and workspace and commit digests remain distinct.
• DL-0046: Structured objects and graded findings are the primary mutation result; optional text rendering, fencing, and deterministic replay remain available.
• DL-0047 and DL-0049: Stored declaration interiors are typed; old schemas upcast at the boundary without changing identity, and the kernel need not parse stored data.
• DL-0048: Branches and two-parent commits merge via a common base, union, and recompile; valuation, constraint, and negation conflicts remain explicit and deterministic.
• DL-0052: Humans and machines may mint attributed ledger rulings; supervision is asynchronous, with correction by a later ruling.
• DL-0054: Attribution and decision state are caller-supplied data; citations must resolve, and unknown decisions fail closed.
• DL-0055: Store-backed projects replay the selected head or follow a branch as configured; storage schema changes and wire claims stay coupled and checked.
• DL-0056: Corpus exchange preserves interner names and decision data; unsupported rendering is refused explicitly, never returned as an empty success.
• DL-0058: Supported expert authoring declarations use the same staged, checked, durable path and record citations as data.
• DL-0059: Preserve the original pack scope through commits; an empty corpus has no facts, and imported claim IDs are checked against their contents.
• DL-0061: Escape caller-supplied controls in finding messages at the serialization boundary so content cannot forge a second finding.
• DL-0064: The killed registry predicate records prohibited tokens as data and is excluded from killed-token usage scans.
• DL-0065, DL-0066, DL-0067, DL-0068, and DL-0069, as amended by DL-0101: Canon exports derive their retained domains and provenance from the folded store; private-consumer parity targets do not bind the fiction release.
• DL-0070: Standing is asserted, proposed, provisional, or ratified; legacy stored values upcast honestly and current citation state is explicit.
• DL-0071: Valued states lower to evaluable facts and temporal fluent spans; continuity checks use their intervals.
• DL-0072: Teaching material describes citation integrity and caller-owned authorization, not a required human sign-off.
• DL-0073: Functional contradictions compare normalized values, inspect canon against itself, and retain explicit blame.
• DL-0074 and DL-0075: Functional dependencies are declared, persisted, and checked by the same primitive at load, fork, and merge boundaries.
• DL-0078: Entity identity is explicit, defeasible, symmetric, and transitive; era/event identity is refused and ordinary facts do not silently activate identity.
• DL-0079, as amended by DL-0101: use, draft, and export declarations are intentionally inert; narration and variants retain their recorded limits; text removal is cancelled.
• DL-0080: Typed identity and rule authoring preserve provenance, temporal reference findings, and structured finding data.
• DL-0081: Inertial persistence is a valuation-lazy projection; only a certain declaration and later distinct certain value cap an open span, and defeating that support can restore it.
• DL-0082: author.as_of uses the continuity checker’s canonical slot projection, reports uncertainty and supporting boundaries, and does not fall back to unrelated raw facts.
• DL-0083: Recording decisions is durable; decision-stamped materialization and why explanations retain their recorded scope and provenance.
• DL-0084 and DL-0091: Predicate and entity-candidate reads are bounded and deterministic; candidates come from declared entities and use the specified exact ranking.
• DL-0085: author.why accepts a typed goal; decision-stamped materialization applies to facts, not arbitrary carriage declarations.
• DL-0086: Merge-base work is linear in the reachable commit graph, and dry-run merge leaves refs unchanged.
• DL-0087, as amended by DL-0102: Retain permanent, non-vacuous incremental-evaluator differential and confluence coverage for negation, defeater-only growth, identity, and strata, with full recompilation fallback; retire the unused loader-reuse compiler and its workstream.
• DL-0089 and DL-0102: Retain the bounded compiled-world cache and incremental evaluator saturation; retire the unused loader-reuse compiler.
• DL-0092: Predicate identity is an explicit, defeasible, symmetric-transitive claim, never inferred from spelling.
• DL-0093: Resolution indexes and the live lowering interner are derived workspace state, with results equivalent to a fresh rebuild.
• DL-0094 and DL-0095: Persisted valuations cross independently compiled worlds by exact variable name, never by local atom index; corruption fails closed.
• DL-0096: Defeats are durable conditional attacks; defeating an attacker can restore its target, while cycles remain undecided.
• DL-0097: Explanations distinguish active minimal support paths from blocked alternatives and report deterministic direct blockers.
• DL-0098: Decision batches validate once and commit atomically; failure cannot leave a partial batch.
• DL-0100: Materialize honors the standard workspace digest fence and idempotency key.
• DL-0101 (human): The release serves fiction, removes the former private consumer, retains the lorestore, ships .dli by default, and cuts unused work rather than archiving it in-tree.
• DL-0102: Remove the unused loader-reuse compiler while retaining safe full compilation and the independently checked evaluator reuse path.
• DL-0103: Serve only contract 2.0.0; register each retired version and removed operation with its successor, preserving current replay and defeat semantics.

Rationale. The release needs a readable authoritative record while preserving its surviving engineering laws and their historical evidence.

DL-0105 — Ship text tools in the default build

Date: 2026-11-02

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. Ship the .dli parser and renderer in the default CLI and server builds. Keep the content-addressed lorestore canonical. Provide deloreis init to create a store-backed project and deloreis import to load its first text world without overwriting an existing world. A deliberate --no-default-features build remains parser-free and is checked separately.

Rationale. Fiction authors need a working text entry point and a direct path from an example document to the persistent authoring server.

DL-0106 — Surface conflicts involving proposed values

Date: 2026-11-02

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. A declared-functional, non-fluent slot with distinct live values, at least one an authored proposal that is still possible, raises continuity.pending-conflict at warning severity unless the slot already has a certain authored functional-dependency violation. The warning does not assign standing, resolve the accounts, or block materialization. Dead claims do not participate; fluent slots remain subject to interval-sensitive checks.

Rationale. Authors need to see potential continuity debt while preserving rival accounts and leaving decisions to the caller.

DL-0107 — Correct pre-release contract fixtures

Date: 2026-11-02

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. Permit the exact registry transition identified by the two digests in xtask/src/fixtures.rs for the fiction reset’s contract 2.0.0 workspace fence, naming repair, and claim-ID corrections. This is a single pre-release exception; all other fixture changes remain subject to the existing contract-version fence. The corrected fixtures must be replayed and schema checked.

Rationale. The reset requires these authoring fixes while retaining the owner’s decision to serve contract 2.0.0 alone.

DL-0108 — Preserve attacked support through metadata revisions

Date: 2026-11-02

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. A standing change selects a stored support for the requested claim and decision, rather than an unrelated support sharing the claim ID. An attack continues to name its exact historical carrier when metadata-only promotion replaces that carrier in the current fold. Validation requires the carrier to have been reachable when the attack was introduced and requires a current fact with the same content identity and claim ID. Corpus exchange includes any superseded carriers needed to replay those attacks, before the current folded facts.

Rationale. A retcon must not erase independent accounts, lose its recorded evidence, or prevent later metadata promotion and replay.

DL-0109 — Make question outcomes authorable and durable

Date: 2026-11-02

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. author.add_option may specify a ground implies atom. Its option supports that outcome under the existing mutually exclusive question semantics. Option identifiers must be distinct from other option and hypothesis names in the world. Adding an option durably stages the replacement question; options must be added before that question is materialized. Invalid outcomes and colliding names are refused, and normal finding checks apply to outcome text.

Rationale. A fiction author needs rival accounts to retain separate, replayable support, without losing options on commit or aliasing alternatives.

DL-0110 — Preserve standing in era-derived chronology

Date: 2026-11-02

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. Events placed during ordered eras inherit symbolic precedence from both memberships and the complete era-order path. Alternative paths retain conditioned support and defeaters. A possible path must be jointly compatible with the constraint theory. Timeline reads and fluent projections use certain precedence; hard chronology-cycle findings require a certain cycle and retain its supporting rulings. Possible precedence remains available to the standing-aware order reader. These judgments re-evaluate after valuation changes and replay from stored declarations. Permit only the exact pre-release fixture-registry transition in xtask/src/fixtures.rs for the two recaptured timeline responses; all other fixture changes retain the version fence.

Rationale. Story-time order must not turn a draft or defeated placement into certain chronology, hide a conflict, or lose its evidence after replay.

DL-0111 — Project fluent facts in point-in-time queries

Date: 2026-11-02

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. CLI query --as-of and dli.query with as_of project state facts through the fluent timeline before recomputing rules. Independent timeless support remains available. Temporal uncertainty shares compatible ordering assumptions across facts; an unresolved inertial projection or unsupported uncertain chronology is refused with temporal-indeterminate. A later competitor unordered with the cutoff prevents an earlier inertial value from reading certainly current. The point-in-time query digest binds the projected world. This amends the earlier restriction of inertial projection to author.as_of; author.query remains an unprojected workspace read.

Rationale. A historical query must not assert a state before it starts or retain a superseded value, and derived answers must follow the same evidence.

DL-0112 — Bind historical exports to their time point

Date: 2026-11-02

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. Exports may select an era or event through CLI --as-of or wire as_of. The exporter projects each temporal source through the same fluent semantics as point-in-time queries before selecting certain source atoms. It retains independent timeless claims and source-specific support. The manifest records and binds the cutoff. Unresolvable chronology is refused. A compiled world lacking complete temporal source metadata must be recompiled before a historical query or export, rather than guessing at its support.

Rationale. A historical artifact needs the values and provenance that hold at its stated point, with enough information to reproduce it after reopening.

DL-0113 — Preserve proposal bundle identities in text

Date: 2026-11-03

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. A proposed claim may carry an explicit bundle identity in the form proposed-bundle "scope#number". It denotes the same hypothesis as the corresponding anonymous positional proposal. The scope may be empty for a scope-less source. The form cannot be combined with provenance tags or an assumes condition. Its ordinal advances the anonymous proposal counter so later proposals cannot reuse an earlier id. Newly stored carried declarations record their positional proposal identities; reconstruction uses the form to preserve support across scopes or numbering gaps; if the source declaration cannot be matched unambiguously to its stored support, reconstruction refuses instead of guessing. Language declarations use their own counter, recorded independently on whole-pack import. Older atomless or language declarations without a recorded identity are refused when they cannot be matched safely; callers can reimport the original source with explicit origins. Fact objects remain canonical.

Proposed facts, attributes and bare entities with citations also retain their source declaration in carriage, because their proposal support polynomial does not encode those citations. Carriage is content-addressed separately from the fact and preserves each authored citation through replay. An older fact object without that carriage cannot recover citations it never recorded; recovering those citations requires the original source. Carried facts and entities must have their corresponding stored fact objects; an unrelated support cannot stand in for a missing one. The existing legacy exception for era-chain tail members remains in force.

Rationale. Re-minting proposal identities while replaying a store can attach a fictional claim to the wrong support, and dropping a # in rendered text can silently lose that support. An explicit, parseable identity makes replay and text round-tripping preserve the original hypotheses.

DL-0114 — Keep carried declarations aligned during decision acceptance

Date: 2026-11-03

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. When materialization accepts staged facts under a decision, any carried declaration that regenerates a stamped fact is revised to produce that same support. Independently cited facts retain their own support. The revised candidate is reconstructed and checked before the ref advances. If a proposed carried annotation has citations that cannot be retained without changing the support, the decision-stamped operation refuses; the caller may materialize it without stamping first. A proposed same-as declaration is likewise materialized separately because stamping its fact would also change the standing of the identity link. Facts implied by a question or fork option keep their option support; accepting the surrounding batch does not choose an option. On replay those option facts are matched by their stored fact identity, so an independent support for the same atom is not consumed and a missing option fact cannot be recreated from the declaration alone.

Rationale. A decision must not make a valid authored entity uncommittable or leave a carried declaration describing different evidence from its fact.

DL-0115 — Preserve origin tags that overlap proposal identities

Date: 2026-11-03

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. A declaration is carried alongside its fact when its provenance contains origin tags that the fact’s support polynomial cannot recover exactly. This includes an origin resembling a positional bundle, a joined or multi-token origin, and tags ignored by the claim’s support semantics. Reconstruction reads the authored tags from that content-addressed carriage. Existing facts that never recorded the distinction cannot recover it without the original source.

Rationale. A caller’s origin is data. A named origin that happens to look like a proposal bundle must not be silently rewritten into a different form.

DL-0116 — Refuse lossy provenance renderings

Date: 2026-11-03

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. A requested .dli rendering is checked by parsing it again and comparing the provenance annotations with the typed source. A rendered corpus export or explicit rendered materialization refuses when provenance would change. A staging mutation may still store the declaration: it omits the lossy rendered line and returns a warning, so fact objects remain usable. This does not reserve new text keywords or change the meaning of existing documents. Status and diff use the same check, retain structural declaration keys, and omit unsafe rendered lines with the warning.

Rationale. Some valid typed origins cannot be expressed as one token in the current text grammar. A successful export must not silently attach a claim to a different origin.

DL-0117 — Reauthor pre-release fiction fixtures

Date: 2026-11-03

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. Permit the exact registry transition identified in the fixture checker for the reauthored contract 2.0.0 examples. Replay the fixtures and validate their schemas; all other changes remain subject to the existing contract-version fence.

Rationale. The first public release needs examples independent of a former consuming project while preserving the contract’s behavior.

DL-0118 — Report likely undeclared entity references

Date: 2026-11-03

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. The shared world check reports entity.undeclared as an advisory finding for a likely misspelled entity or an unknown symbol in a position that also contains a declared entity in the same scope. It carries the referenced name, ranked candidates and source span as repair data. A warning does not block materialization. Untyped values and unrelated abstract subjects are not assumed to be entities.

Review rows render missing before or after facts as absent, rather than calling them defeated. Permit the exact pre-release fixture registry transition in the fixture checker for that correction; replay and schema checks still apply.

Rationale. CLI and authoring clients need the same actionable signal, while fictional concepts that were never declared as entities remain usable.

DL-0119 — Carry forward world independence and store retention

Date: 2026-11-03

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. The standing obligations of DL-0017, DL-0027, and DL-0077 remain in force: the engine does not bake in a world’s content; accepted records are append-only; and deleting a branch removes its pointer, not its reachable or orphaned objects. Garbage collection requires a separate decision.

Rationale. The reset’s summary omitted these still-used rules even though implementation and documentation continue to rely on them.

DL-0120 — Avoid guessing from ambiguous state values

Date: 2026-11-03

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. Qualify DL-0118: an undotted state’s value is not diagnosed as an entity reference merely because the same predicate has held a declared entity. A synthetic valueless dotted state is also excluded from this shared warning when lowering has lost the distinction from an undotted value; its authoring validation continues to check the reference separately.

Rationale. Predicate positions do not declare types, so a concept that happens to resemble an entity is not evidence of a misspelling.

DL-0121 — Correct era ordering before release

Date: 2026-11-04

Attribution: machine.

Ruling. Derive event-to-era precedence from the event’s membership and era ordering, preserving the support for each inference; only certain edges enter the certain chronology. The same chronology applies to checks, timeline reads, and point-in-time queries; an ordering cycle blocks projection. An event remains unordered relative to its own era. Recompute era-path caches written by earlier implementations. Permit the exact pre-release registry transition in the fixture checker for the two updated timeline fixtures, which must replay and pass schema validation.

Rationale. A known event in an earlier era must not make a later-era query indeterminate, and the checker must detect contradictory chronology using the same ordering as reads.

DL-0122 — Understanding before release

Date: 2026-11-04

Attribution: human.

Ruling. The owner directed:

something beyond a one off blog post has to be our target. we shouldnt write the blog post now,but we need to be sure weve got a path to people really understanding this work and putting it to use.

were doing everyhing up to the release first. and note that another agent will do the actual mesite work. it just has to file the resources for it to piick up

The owner’s picks are: flagship, “Sherlock Holmes canon”; home, “DLI Pages + mesite page”; timing, “Hold the release too”. Hold the release candidate, release publication, and macOS build until the understanding work is complete. The DLI repository supplies resources for a separate mesite agent; it does not write or publish the mesite post.

Rationale. A release needs an example and guidance that help people learn the tool and use it on their own fiction.