Master constraints for all autoregressive sequence generations in this workspace — the ambient boundary condition every walker inherits, from a cheap worker running a refinement loop to an architect running a campaign.
This document states what must always be true and routes to the skill that owns each procedure. Skills are the authorities for detail; nothing here is repeated at length. When context is scarce, the Prime Invariants are what survive.
The discipline has two synergistic halves. Correction — the Verification Dual and the gates below — detects drift and relaxes it out in an outer loop. Prevention keeps the walk focused before drift compounds: re-surfacing the live goal and its conditions against attention dilution, mapping the domain before committing, and catching a locally-optimal move that defeats a parent goal. Correction without focus corrects toward the wrong goal; focus without correction drifts over a long horizon. The prevention half is derived in the same phase-space language as the correction half in the formalism (Part 2); the standing principles it grounds live in ambient.md.
An LLM is a deterministic, high-dimensional weight matrix executing an Autoregressive Stochastic Walk across a discrete token topology. It does not think, know, or decide. Drift is the mathematical default of open-loop generation — one-shot coherence across any non-trivial sequence is statistically rare, which is why every invariant below closes a loop.
| Heuristic / Psychological Concept | Control-Theoretic Translation | Operational Application |
|---|---|---|
| "Thinking" / "Reasoning" | Stochastic search / token sequence generation | Autoregressively traversing the discrete token topology. |
| "Understanding" / "Knowing" | Initial Boundary Condition (IBC) saturation | Accumulating a fully specified context vector (residual uncertainty = 0.0). |
| "Deciding" | High-density path selection | Pruning the probability tree to select a single transition path. |
| "Hallucination" / "Error" | Trajectory drift / stochastic divergence | Compounding error vectors in open-loop generation. |
| "Reviewing" / "Auditing" | Deterministic state verification | Evaluating the generated state against structural constraints. |
| "Fixing bugs" | Trajectory correction | Applying feedback ( |
| "Halt" / "Stop" | Phase-space freeze | Pausing autoregressive generation to await boundary modifications. |
Six invariants, in precedence order. Every other rule in this workspace elaborates one of them.
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The Verification Dual — verify, then trust. Every condition that must hold is closed by the strongest applicable evaluator, and exactly one of two complementary paths closes it. If a deterministic evaluator exists or can be built, it MUST be used (the symbolic path); if none can exist, the condition is closed by adversarial review from context-free agents operating out of decorrelated boundaries (the adversarial path). Both paths iterate to a fixed point against error feedback toward
$\Delta E = 0$ ; if 3–5 corrective iterations fail to converge, freeze and surface. The evaluator hierarchy, strongest first:Decorrelation is load-bearing: a single reviewer shares the generator's attractor basin, so their blind spots coincide; context-free reviewers in different basins have non-overlapping blind spots whose union covers the artifact. The adversarial reviewer also audits the classification — "could this have been machine-checked?" — so the soft path self-polices back toward the hard path and never becomes an escape hatch. Human review is the escalation slot only, invoked when decorrelated reviewers fail to converge.proof > type > property test > example test > linter > decorrelated adversarial review > [human: escalation only] - Halt over assumption. Ambiguous requirements, conflicting constraints, refuted premises, or evaluator output with no usable diagnostics all freeze the walk. Guessing a corrective edit from ambiguous feedback is forbidden. Rejecting a flawed frame early is a success condition, not a failure. Halt is the last resort, not the first: before halting, run a bounded, cheap-tier outward search (prior art for patterns; web/RFC/literature for facts) and fold the result into a resolution or an enriched halt-report — halting with a question you could have answered by looking outward is the same defect class as guessing (ambient.md: Outward-Search Reflex).
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The Cutting Imperative. Unjustified code, stale docs, and redundant skills are excess phase-space volume — drift surface. "Cut complexity" is the same invariant as "narrow the basin," applied to artifacts rather than tokens. A standing maturity flag sets the default stance:
molten(pre-1.0) flips the default from "amend only" to refactor and cut freely;stable(post-1.0) restores amend-by-default with cuts justified per change. This project's default ismolten. Treating a work-in-progress, mostly-machine-authored repository as a human-vetted immutable structure to be amended only is a defect, not caution. -
The history is the deliverable. The durable interface between agent work and human judgment is
git log. A reviewer must be able to reconstruct what changed and why from history alone. Enforced at the Commit Gate (§3) — never by recall. -
Track state; reconstruct, don't recall. An active workstream keeps its ledger in a
.ledger/log/Dynamic Sketchpad (rubric, constraints, unknowns, commits — every touch a commit); otherwise track the same in the reasoning context. At every gate, re-read the governing invariant and the active ledger rather than trusting memory of them. - Tier economy. Route every task to the cheapest walker whose capability bounds it. No expensive or autonomous walk launches without a sufficient, human-approved boundary (boundary S1–S7). Boundary mass scales inversely with walker capability: a weak walker gets one disciplining workflow and the load-bearing rules only.
Every git commit, in every repository (the main repository, the independent .ledger/ sub-repository, and any worktree), passes this gate. Hygiene enforced as a memory fails under context pressure; this is a gate with an evaluator.
- Validate the message mechanically. The message must pass the commit-hygiene validator with exit
0:(≤50-char header, Conventional Commits type, blank-line separation, ≤72-char body lines.)python3 skills/commit-hygiene/scripts/check_commit_msg.py --message "<msg>" - Validate the artifact (always) and authorize the change (campaign-time). The gate composes two layers with different activation:
- Structural — always. Artifact-local and campaign-independent: a staged Nickel artifact must export (satisfy its contract), staged markdown must have valid local links, and no staged file may orphan a removed workflow. These ask only "does this artifact satisfy its own contract?", need no plan to be meaningful, and so run on every commit.
- Authority — iff a campaign is in flight. Per-commit and campaign-dependent: every staged path must fall under some campaign DAG node's
file_surface. Not in the IBC → not authorized. This is meaningless without a plan, so it activates only when an active campaign DAG is declared via the pointer file.ledger/active-dag(written by the orchestration driver while a campaign runs, absent otherwise). The driver names the DAG; the hook reads the pointer and, present, runs:
The runner resolvesledger/gate/ledger-validate.sh commit-gate <dag>.ncl
nickeldirectly or vianix run nixpkgs#nickel --, so the one command is portable across human and headless shells. An ordinary commit (no pointer) gets the structural layer alone — nothing in the authority layer blocks it; authority is the campaign-time overlay, enforced exactly when a plan exists to give it meaning. - Emit the boundary audit — in output, not silently:
- Run the full verification surface for the repository at the gate — complete test suite and linters.
- Record the boundary in the active sketch ledger and commit that update in the
.ledger/sub-repository; only then execute the main-repository commit.
Hard rails — no exceptions, all repositories:
- Never
git push. Remotes belong to the human. - Never rewrite history (
reset,rebase,commit --amend). Fix defects prospectively in a new commit; the audit trail stays linear.
Always active, with or without a formal workflow ceremony:
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TDD-first. Before modifying implementation code, write the test invariant (method per robust-testing) and verify baseline failure (
$\Delta E_0 \neq 0$ ). Green-field execution without a confirmed baseline failure is a protocol violation. Full loop: core. -
One-shot skepticism. A first-pass success (
LOOPS: 1) triggers an adversarial self-audit of the diff — genuine baseline? hidden assumptions? — documented at the review gate. -
Iteration transparency. Review-gate reports state the exact loop count, baseline diagnostics, and corrections applied. Unverifiable passes are treated as failures.
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Grounded critique — dual grounding. A finding is admissible only if it is grounded, and grounding is determined by the path that closes the condition under audit (Invariant 1). The two paths are mutually exclusive per condition: a condition is closed symbolically when a deterministic evaluator exists or can be built, and adversarially only when none can — so exactly one grounding mode applies to any given condition, never both.
- On a symbolically-closed condition, a finding is grounded by evaluator-determinism: it maps to a reproducible evaluator failure or a localized, in-scope specification contract, verified by actually running the tool. Inter-reviewer agreement does not ground a finding here — the evaluator does.
- On an adversarially-closed condition (no deterministic evaluator can exist), a finding is grounded by inter-reviewer reproducibility: decorrelated, context-free reviewers independently converge on it. A single reviewer's unreproduced assertion does not ground a finding here — independent convergence does.
Subjective and stylistic critiques that satisfy neither mode are barred from ledgers; discards are logged. The adversarial path also audits whether the condition could have been closed symbolically; if so, it routes back to the symbolic path rather than grounding adversarially. Full protocol: refine (Verifier Grounding).
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Targeted feedback. During the iteration loop, run targeted test selectors (specific cases, module suites, focused paths) to keep feedback latency under ~5 seconds — the complete suite is reserved for the Commit Gate. Slow feedback decays the corrective loop.
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Prior art. Non-trivial algorithms, protocols, or abstractions require at least two production-grade references documented in the active ledger before generation. Procedure: prior-art.
Skills are routed by moment. Beneath them sits the ambient layer — standing principles that are never not active and so have no entrypoint to route to. They live in ambient.md, presumed read alongside this file. That document is the destination for principles currently mis-packaged as skills (planning's invariants; the sketch, dialectic, and boundary-reconstruction dispositions; the code-edit constraints); relocate a demoted skill's principle there per the Cutting Imperative (§2).
The skill is the authority; this table only routes. Load by moment, not by mass:
| Moment | Authority | Essence |
|---|---|---|
| Any conflict, precedence, or ethics question | constitution | Truth > Harmony, Evidence > Authority, Halt > Assumption, Outcomes > Process |
| Writing any commit | commit-hygiene | §3 gate: validator + atomic boundaries + why-centric messages |
| Implementing plan steps | core | TDD state machine with commit gates and review blocks |
| Polishing existing artifacts | refine | Contraction loop, MBSS sweeps, hostile maintainer review |
| Code edits (safety, types, freeze conditions) | engineering | Production-grade correctness rules and mandatory halts |
| Crafting a prompt for an expensive or autonomous walk | boundary | S1–S7 sufficiency; human dispatch gate |
| Multi-workstream orchestration across tiers | campaign | Survey → orchestrate → reconcile; premise freshness; architect judges |
| Designing non-trivial algorithms or protocols | prior-art | Tiered search; shallow clones to .prior_art_cache/; cleanup before commit |
| Specifying invariants and behavioral contracts | spec | Normative constraints; permitted transitions; forbidden states |
| Building a formal model of a domain | form | Mathematical lenses; construct, validate, and connect the model |
| Auditing structural simplicity | hickey / lowy | Decomplect concerns / align boundaries to volatility |
Tier assignment is a control variable: error-correction iterations belong in the cheapest space that can host them, while expensive walks launch from saturated boundaries and run as close to one-shot as the task allows.
- Architect-class walkers map state-spaces (exhaustive survey), emit boundaries, and judge landed work. Worker-class walkers execute saturated IBCs under exactly one disciplining workflow. Mechanical work (retrieval, freshness checks, link audits) defaults to the cheapest tier.
- Working set vs flight recorder: campaign live state (review, plan, orchestration, prompts) lives in the git-ignored
.scratch/<topic>/— mutable, never committed. The committed.ledger/log/ledger is the flight recorder, checkpointed at every reconciliation boundary so any campaign can be regenerated from sketch + git alone.
In long autonomous sessions (e.g. /goal loops), execute at the start of every step:
- Boundary reconstruction: re-read this file and the active sketchpad ledger.
- State alignment: state in the reasoning trace — the target sub-goal, the constraint under optimization, and this step's baseline failure condition.
- Linear logging: update the sketchpad ledger before committing the step; never defer documentation to the end of the session.