The plan

This plan is a dependency graph, not a schedule. There are no durations anywhere in it — not because they are unknown, but because a duration is the wrong instrument for work that parallelizes. The graph’s shape is the point: where it is wide, many nodes run at once; where it is a chain, one artifact truly consumes another. The build’s rate is set by how wide the frontier is, so the plan optimizes for width and states the frontier explicitly.

The decision ledger (decisions.md) outranks this plan. A node’s oracle is how we know the node is done; a milestone is a set of nodes, never a date.

Node schema

Each node carries:

• id — a lane-prefixed identifier (CORE-2, TIME-3).
• deliverable — the artifact the node produces.
• needs — the nodes whose artifacts this node consumes. An edge exists only when B consumes A’s artifact — not for thematic affinity, not for “related to.” If B could start with A merely planned, there is no edge.
• produces — what downstream nodes consume from this one.
• oracle — the concrete check that closes the node. A node without a falsifiable oracle is not a node.
• lane — the concern it belongs to (one of nineteen).
• external — true when the node is delivered by another party (the author’s rulings); deferred when the node is parked behind a named flip condition and is not built at v1.

The nineteen lanes

Nodes marked external or deferred are placed in the lane whose artifact they touch; they are not a lane of their own.

Release priority

The current priority is the fiction-release reset (DL-0101), which sits outside this graph. The task list is docs/release/HANDOVER.md and the target is docs/release/north-star.md. The four-suite benchmark evidence program that used to be named here is retired. The distribution nodes below (DIST-) are parked with no trigger, and the scrub tasks retire or remove the BENCH-, SURF-4 and former-consumer-bound nodes.

The node registry

infra

• INFRA-1 — Repository scaffold: cargo workspace, cargo xtask gate (CI-parity as a compiled Rust test), the three git-orchestration scripts, and the deterministic offline CI lanes. Needs: none. Produces: the buildable tree and the gate. Oracle: cargo xtask gate is green on the scaffold; the deterministic CI lanes pass with no network.

docs

• DOCS-1 — The lead documentation set: charter, decision ledger, this plan, and the integration contract. Needs: none. Produces: the settled decisions the specs elaborate. Oracle: every doc carries status + verdict frontmatter; the ledger is present and single-writer.
• DOCS-2 — The spec suite: spec/00-overview.md, the per-lane specs, and the design notes. Needs: DOCS-1. Produces: the buildable spec of each lane. Oracle: every spec has frontmatter; every fenced example passes the docs-oracle (the real parser, dli_syntax::parse_document, over every fenced .dli block and every committed example).
• EXT-A1 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

core

• CORE-1 — AST types + the schemars-derived JSON Schema + the recursive-descent parser skeleton. Needs: INFRA-1. Produces: the normative AST and its schema. Oracle: the schema is derived from the types (no drift); AST↔canonical round-trips; insta-snapshotted.
• CORE-2 — The annotated seminaive evaluator: condition polynomials, the grade lattice, annotation-aware delta semantics, absorption normalization at every join, and the inverted provenance indexes. Needs: CORE-1. Produces: assertability, closures, support reads. Oracle: T1/T2 (status derivation, transitive closures) over real canon; differential agreement with the legacy gates.
• CORE-3 — The verdict lattice: checked > tested > attested > asserted, the two-channel support/grade semantics, and weakest-grade rollup over the procedure chain. Needs: CORE-1. Produces: graded verdicts. Oracle: rollup is the minimum over the procedure chain, never over citations; judgments replay identically.
• FRONT-1 — The loader/front-end: canon fronted as AST, with range-restriction and stratification (negative-dependency acyclicity) checked at load. Needs: CORE-1. Produces: the loaded, well-formed world. Oracle: real canon loads; a cyclic negative dependency is a load-time finding.
• DEF-3 — (deferred.) The SMT seat. Needs: none. Produces: nothing until triggered. Oracle: the trigger — a ratified arithmetic law — is documented; the seat is not built at v1.
• DEF-4 — (deferred.) Multi-authority valuation (per-author valuations, a merge policy). Explicitly outside v1. Needs: none. Produces: nothing until triggered. Oracle: the single-authority limit is documented as the standing boundary.

query

• ENG-1 — The query engine (query, --layer/--as-of/--fork/--why) with blame / min-why / why-not. Needs: CORE-2. Produces: queries and dependency reads. Oracle: --why renders the support antichain; blame reads the defeater.
• ENG-2 — The fork manager (fork new/suppose/add/diff/promote, preflight). Needs: CORE-2. Produces: forks and derived-consequence diffs. Oracle: forks are O(1); diff is a derived-consequence diff; preflight is a candidate-valuation evaluation with a conflict scan.

check

• CHECK-1 — Continuity (the six classes) + factcheck (claims → supported/contradicted/unsupported with D-citations; rejected-lore constraints enforced). Needs: CORE-2, FRONT-1. Produces: the world-check battery. Oracle: shadow-read parity against the legacy continuity and factcheck oracles.

time

• TIME-1 — The partial-order module: the era spine, before-facts, happens-before as a kernel rule under CI, cycle blame, and unordered as a first-class verdict. Needs: CORE-2. Produces: the ordered chronology. Oracle: a before-cycle is reported as blame; an undeclared pair answers unordered, never a tie-break.
• TIME-2 — Fluents: validity spans (since/until/during), the cautious three-valued projection, and state-at. Needs: TIME-1. Produces: time-anchored facts. Oracle: D-0114 water-status checks clean in both eras (the pre-enclosure flashback and the story-present episode), with no false contradiction.
• TIME-3 — Episode anchors + order-rules + slack (earliest/latest legal slot)
  • the offset→before migration compiler. Needs: TIME-2, EPI-1. Produces: the checked episode order. Oracle: order-rules check by linear scan; slack is a forward/backward pass; the compiler emits before-facts with adjacent citations.
• DEF-1 — (deferred.) The owned episode-order searcher (topological + chronological backtracking + window forward-checking). Needs: TIME-3. Produces: nothing until triggered. Oracle: the flip condition — a real propose-orderings workflow with soft/disjunctive constraints — is documented; every found order re-passes the TIME-3 checker.

practice

• PRAC-1 — Practice parameterization: typed sorts (including the wheel sort), the closed resource algebra (linear/affine/graded monotone), side conditions, and error-class declarations that refine the seven structural classes. Needs: CORE-2. Produces: declared practices (magic systems). Oracle: practice well-formedness holds; the true-naming fixture is the acceptance test (a second, structurally disjoint practice hosts with no kernel code).
• PRAC-2 — The ledger checker (check-proof in <practice>): the premise-pool projection (certain ∩ known-by-speaker ∩ present), the linear accounting, and the expected-verdict discipline. Needs: PRAC-1, TIME-2. Produces: diegetic proof verdicts. Oracle: the practice scene checks; a slack-tide ward in a flood-bound scene is a wrong-hour (L3 timing) error.

sim

• SIM-1 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• SIM-2 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• EXT-A2 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• DEF-2 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

language

• LANG-1 — Register / morpheme / name / term declarations with bundle provenance (one hypothesis variable per proposal bundle). Needs: CORE-2. Produces: the language packs. Oracle: the registers port one-to-one from the legacy data; a name is a typed derivation citing its register and composition.
• LANG-2 — The derivation checker (phonotactics + slot grammars) + name-space queries + the generated ratified-names view + aural distinctness. Needs: LANG-1. Produces: the compiled name-space (the mirror’s successor). Oracle: shadow-read parity against the legacy vet on the ratified names and the batch-001 candidates; a colliding declaration fails deloreis check.

episode

• EPI-1 — The episode schema: the delta form + story-time anchors (at, after/before, phase bindings), scenes with cast/presence, and knowledge fluents. Needs: CORE-1. Produces: the episode fold inputs. Oracle: the fold runs in production order; a flashback scene carries its own anchor and folds correctly.

attestation

• ATT-1 — The attestation store + attestation-missing findings + the attested-grade consuming checks. Needs: CORE-3. Produces: the graded model-judgment layer. Oracle: the store is append-only per question; a check lacking its attestation reports attestation-missing, never a guess; no consensus lifts the grade.

payload

• PAY-1 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• PAY-2 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• PAY-3 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

surface

• SURF-1 — The formatter: the single canonical rendering (write sloppy, save canonical), gate-enforced. Needs: CORE-1. Produces: canonical surface. Oracle: the canonical form is idempotent; non-canonical text is legal input, never legal repo state.

• SURF-2 — The graded error ladder: domain-speaking diagnostics via miette. Needs: CORE-2, SURF-1. Produces: the error surface. Oracle: diagnostics speak the domain (a missing ruling, not “unbound identifier”); insta-snapshotted.

• SURF-3 — The reference cards (gentle subset + expert tier) + the human-writer probe protocol. Needs: SURF-1. Produces: the teaching surface. Oracle: every gentle-subset example on the first card compiles; no expert-tier word appears on the first card.

• SURF-4 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• BENCH-1 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• BENCH-2 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

serve

• CON-1 — The contracts/dli-worker contract: the schemas, the op/tool inventory, and the closed fixture registry. Needs: DOCS-1, ENG-2. Produces: the boundary shared by server and clients. Oracle: an op or tool without golden + negative + framing fixtures does not exist; verdict parity holds across the fixtures.

• SERVE-1 — deloreis serve: the MCP / JSON-over-stdio server carrying the batch dli.* operations. Needs: CON-1, ENG-2, CHECK-1. Produces: the running server. Oracle: golden/negative/framing fixtures pass; the envelope carries no timestamps and rejects unknown fields.

• CLI-1 — The deloreis CLI: check, query, fmt, fork, preflight, timeline, export, name, check-proof, report, serve, mcp. Needs: CHECK-1. Produces: the command surface. Oracle: the man-page operations run; exit codes reflect verdicts.

• AUTH-1 — The authoring tool surface: the workspace/staging engine, the author.* tools, per-tool golden/negative/framing fixtures, and immediate graded findings on every mutating call. Needs: CON-1, ENG-2, FRONT-1. Produces: the tool surface. Oracle: the author-session golden fixture passes end to end; the framing-attack fixture leaves verdicts unchanged.

• AUTH-2 — An original worked fiction scenario over the authoring tools. Needs: AUTH-1, CHECK-1. Produces: a replayable example and transcript. Oracle: the Hollow scenario exercises contradiction, contested claims, retcon and restoration, a what-if, and replay after restart.

• EXT-F3 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• EXT-F4 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

export

• EXP-1 — The export core (export --profile <target> at the CLI; explicit registry and valuation options in the library): one-way compiles from the certain layer, with a manifest. Needs: ENG-1. Produces: the export backend spine. Oracle: an export reads the certain layer and fails closed on proposed lore; the manifest traces every artifact to its exact canon state.

• EXP-2 — The context-pack backend (the first export backend, formalized). Needs: EXP-1. Produces: the audio-script context packs. Oracle: it reproduces today’s context-pack output.

• EXP-3 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• DEF-5 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• EXP-4 — The video-game (articy-shaped JSON) and free-rider (CSV, static wiki) profiles. Needs: EXP-1. Produces: the remaining export targets. Oracle: typed entities with who-may-know-what scopes; citations travel as dev-metadata, stripped for ship.

assurance

• PROOF-1 — The mutation harness: seeded-violation operators × the real gates; every check gets operators. Needs: CHECK-1. Produces: the gate-coverage proof. Oracle: every operator is caught; honest misses are xfail-strict, never hidden.

• PROOF-2 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• MIG-1 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• MIG-2 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• MIG-3 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• MIG-4 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• VAL-1 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• EXT-F1 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• EXT-F2 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

• EXT-F5 — Retired under the fiction-release reset; no release deliverable.

store

The lorestore cutover (DL-0041). The staged plan with full design rules, theory grounding, and the risk register is design-notes/lorestore-roadmap.md; these nodes are its skeleton.

• LS-0 — Ratify the pivot: DL-0041, the law updates in AGENTS.md, this lane, and the consolidation pointers in the four source notes. Needs: none. Produces: the authority every later store node cites. Oracle: cargo xtask authority and the docs-oracle are green; DL-0041 names the superseded clauses of DL-0003 and DL-0029.

• LS-1 — The fact-object model: Rust types + schemars JSON Schemas for FactObject/Commit/Ref/EvidenceEnvelope, JCS canonical bytes, SHA-256 identity, the three-way identity split (content-hash versions, minted claim ids, provenance-bearing lineage edges), canonical polynomial DNF, no floats, schema_version + upcast-on-read. Needs: LS-0. Produces: the normative stored-object schema. Oracle: total lowering — the vendored corpus lowered to fact objects compiles to the identical fixpoint, findings, and digests.

• LS-2 — The lorestore crate MVP: loose-object store, refs with valuation overlays, append-only commit log, CAS ref updates, advisory lock, crash-safe write ordering, filesystem-only storage trait; workspace digest becomes the root commit hash; no secondary indexes, no branches beyond main. Needs: LS-1. Produces: durable deterministic persistence. Oracle: cross-platform root-hash determinism; crash injection never tears the store; state ≡ fold(commit log) property-tested.

• LS-3 — The read path: dli_world::compile from lorestore; the one-way .dli → lorestore import tool; config-selected dual backend. Needs: LS-2. Produces: worlds compiled from stored facts; the migration path. Oracle: differential parity — .dli source and its import compile identically.

• LS-4 — Mutations stage structured fact objects; materialize commits them with a separate workspace fence and commit hash. The contract 2.0 fixtures verify the durable path.

• LS-5 — The query and review contract: the JSON response schema carrying bindings, provenance antichain, grade, and (root_hash, valuation); the MCP-served structured-diff/review contract (deloreis ships no review UI — rendering is consumer-owned). Needs: LS-4. Produces: replayable verdicts; the review data that replaces git-diff-of-text. Oracle: a stored result replays byte-identical from (root_hash, valuation, query); a golden review-flow fixture drives a seeded change-set through the JSON contract alone.

• LS-6 — The merge engine: commit DAG with merge commits, 3-way merge over fact sets, conflict detection confined to valuation disagreement, constraint violations, and stratified-negation effects. Needs: LS-5. Produces: persistent divergent worlds with deterministic reconciliation. Oracle: merge commutes and associates up to root-hash equality on conflict-free corpora; the seeded-conflict corpus catches all three conflict classes.

• LS-9 — Expert-tier structuring: typed interiors for the eleven string-bodied declaration types; downstream semantic parses in dli-world, dli-ledger, and dli-time become typed-AST constructors; stored facts upcast from the v1 string-bodied schema. (Id out of sequence: found by the coupling audit after LS-0..LS-8 shipped; DAG position is LS-1 → LS-9 → LS-7.) Needs: LS-1. Produces: an AST that is AST all the way down; the condition for retiring the parser. Oracle: no crate outside dli_syntax parses stored data; validate_proof_decl’s format-and-reparse round-trip is replaced by a structural validator; upcasted corpora compile identically.

• LS-7 — Text support returns to the default build. The parser-free build remains optional; T9 tracks the work and its checks.

• LS-8 — Contract 2.0.0 is the only served version; prior versions and removed operations are registered as killed forms.

• LS-10 — Deferred incremental compilation (DL-0102): the unused loader-reuse compiler is retired. The bounded commit cache and incremental saturation remain; any future delta compiler requires a new decision and a parity oracle before it is used. Needs: LS-6. Produces: no release deliverable. Oracle: retained saturation and cache tests pass; the retired compiler has no callers.

distribution

Distribution research is parked in design-notes/scale-and-distribution.md. The embedded engine is the release target.

• DIST-1 — Parked distribution research; no fiction-release deliverable.

• DIST-2 — Parked distribution research; no fiction-release deliverable.

• DIST-3 — Parked distribution research; no fiction-release deliverable.

• DIST-4 — Parked distribution research; no fiction-release deliverable.

The dependency graph

graph LR
  INFRA-1 --> CORE-1
  DOCS-1 --> DOCS-2
  DOCS-1 --> CON-1

  CORE-1 --> CORE-2
  CORE-1 --> CORE-3
  CORE-1 --> FRONT-1
  CORE-1 --> EPI-1
  CORE-1 --> SURF-1

  CORE-2 --> ENG-1
  CORE-2 --> ENG-2
  CORE-2 --> CHECK-1
  FRONT-1 --> CHECK-1
  CORE-2 --> TIME-1
  CORE-2 --> PRAC-1
  CORE-2 --> LANG-1
  CORE-2 --> SURF-2
  CORE-2 --> BENCH-1
  CORE-2 --> PROOF-2
  CORE-3 --> ATT-1

  SURF-1 --> SURF-2
  SURF-1 --> SURF-3
  SURF-1 --> BENCH-1

  TIME-1 --> TIME-2
  TIME-2 --> TIME-3
  EPI-1 --> TIME-3
  TIME-2 --> PRAC-2
  PRAC-1 --> PRAC-2
  PRAC-1 --> SIM-1
  SIM-1 --> SIM-2
  SIM-2 --> EXT-A2
  SIM-2 --> DEF-2
  TIME-3 --> DEF-1

  LANG-1 --> LANG-2


  EPI-1 --> PAY-1
  PAY-1 --> PAY-2
  CHECK-1 --> PAY-2
  PRAC-2 --> PAY-2
  PAY-2 --> PAY-3

  ENG-2 --> CON-1
  CON-1 --> SERVE-1
  ENG-2 --> SERVE-1
  CHECK-1 --> SERVE-1
  CON-1 --> AUTH-1
  ENG-2 --> AUTH-1
  FRONT-1 --> AUTH-1
  AUTH-1 --> AUTH-2
  CHECK-1 --> AUTH-2
  CHECK-1 --> CLI-1
  CON-1 --> EXT-F3
  SERVE-1 --> EXT-F3
  AUTH-2 --> EXT-F4

  BENCH-1 --> BENCH-2
  AUTH-1 --> BENCH-2
  SERVE-1 --> BENCH-2
  SURF-1 --> SURF-4
  SURF-2 --> SURF-4
  SURF-3 --> SURF-4
  BENCH-1 --> SURF-4

  ENG-1 --> EXP-1
  EXP-1 --> EXP-2
  EXP-1 --> EXP-3
  SIM-2 --> EXP-3
  EXP-1 --> EXP-4

  CHECK-1 --> PROOF-1
  FRONT-1 --> MIG-1
  MIG-1 --> MIG-2
  PROOF-1 --> MIG-2
  EXT-F1 --> MIG-2
  EXT-F2 --> MIG-2
  EXT-F5 --> MIG-2
  MIG-2 --> MIG-3
  EXT-A1 --> MIG-3
  MIG-3 --> MIG-4
  TIME-3 --> MIG-4
  INFRA-1 --> VAL-1

  LS-0 --> LS-1
  LS-1 --> LS-2
  LS-2 --> LS-3
  LS-3 --> LS-4
  LS-4 --> LS-5
  LS-5 --> LS-6
  LS-1 --> LS-9
  LS-9 --> LS-7
  LS-4 --> LS-7
  LS-5 --> LS-7
  LS-6 --> LS-8
  LS-7 --> LS-8
  EXT-F4 --> LS-8

  LS-5 --> DIST-1
  DIST-1 --> DIST-2
  DIST-1 --> DIST-3
  DIST-2 --> DIST-4
  DIST-3 --> DIST-4

Nodes with no incoming edge are roots: INFRA-1, DOCS-1, EXT-A1, EXT-F1, EXT-F2, EXT-F5 (the zero-state runnable frontier), plus the deferred DEF-3 and DEF-4. The store lane joined after the standalone release closed (DL-0038, DL-0041) and is now complete locally. The distribution lane is a later, deferred chain; the status matrix, not this historical zero-state graph, is the current release authority.

The frontier

The release handover is the current execution order. Complete the remaining private-data and ledger cleanup, ship and harden the text surface, repair the wire issues, then deliver the example and onboarding documentation. Owner-only publication work follows those gates.

Node status matrix

cargo xtask authority requires every registry node to appear exactly once with one of four states. done means the node’s stated oracle is replayable in this tree. open means local engineering remains. deferred names work parked by a ledger ruling or explicit release boundary. external-blocked requires an author or consumer artifact that this repository does not own.

Milestones

The ordered release tasks and their acceptance criteria are maintained in the handover. A release is complete only when its engine, fixtures, examples, documentation, and required reviews have passed.