core/docs/decisions

Architecture Decision Records

This directory contains the Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) for the CORE project.

ADRs record significant architectural decisions: what was decided, why, what alternatives were considered, and what consequences follow. They are permanent records — superseded ADRs are archived, not deleted.

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Index

ADR	Title	Status
ADR-0001	Vocab Layer Invariants	Accepted
ADR-0002	Ingest Layer Design (original)	Archived — superseded by ADR-0012
ADR-0003	Coordinate System Dissolution	Accepted
ADR-0004	Rotor as Operator, Not Property	Accepted
ADR-0005	Language Pack Contract	Accepted
ADR-0006	Field Energy Operator	Accepted
ADR-0007	Valence Layer	Accepted
ADR-0008	Allocation Physics	Accepted
ADR-0009	Compositional Physics	Accepted
ADR-0010	Identity Physics	Accepted
ADR-0011	Renderer	Accepted
ADR-0012	core_ingest Governance Layer	Accepted
ADR-0013	sensorium/ Multimodal Protocol Layer	Accepted
ADR-0014	train/ Learning Loop	Accepted (Stub)
ADR-0015	Language Packs as Compiled Linguistic Manifolds	Accepted
ADR-0016	Capability Roadmap and Eval Methodology	Accepted
ADR-0017	Agency Scope: Responsive-with-Axiology	Accepted
ADR-0018	Tool Use Scope: Typed Deterministic Operators	Accepted
ADR-0019	Exact Vault Recall Acceleration	Accepted
ADR-0020	Phase 5 / Rust Parity Sequencing	Accepted (2026-05-16)
ADR-0021	Epistemic Grade Policy	Accepted
ADR-0022	Forward Semantic Control	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0023	Forward Semantic Control: Proof Evidence	Accepted
ADR-0024	Inner-Loop Per-Rotor Admissibility	Accepted
ADR-0025	Rotor / Frame Admissibility	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0026	Ranked Admissibility with Margin	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0027	Identity Packs — swappable, ratified	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0028	Identity Surface Wiring	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0029	Safety Packs — never-swappable, fail-closed	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0030	Depth-Language Hedge	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0031	Score-Decomposition Surface	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0032	SafetyCheck Predicate Surface	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0033	Ethics Packs — third pack tier	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0034	EthicsCheck Predicate Surface	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0035	Turn-Loop Verdict Surfacing	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0036	Safety-Only Typed Refusal	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0037	Per-Predicate Ethics Refusal Opt-In	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0038	Hedge Injection as Runtime Affordance	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0039	Audit Completeness — TurnVerdicts + stub TurnEvent	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0040	Structured-Logging Sink	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0041	--show-verdicts + FanOutSink	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0042	Audit Tour Demo (core demo audit-tour)	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0043	Phase-2 pack measurements — claims → numbers	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0044	Medical / clinical ethics pack (worked-example domain pack)	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0045	Long-context recall: CORE vs transformer baselines	Accepted (2026-05-17)
ADR-0046	PropositionGraph as forward AdmissibilityRegion + industry demos	Accepted (2026-05-18)

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ADR-0024 chain — Forward Semantic Control closure

ADR-0022 through ADR-0026 form a single coherent chain that closes forward semantic control as a non-stochastic, replay-deterministic, trace-evidenced mechanism. Read in order:

1. ADR-0022 — Forward Semantic Control. Establishes the AdmissibilityRegion data structure (allowed indices, relation blade, frame versor) and the contract that a region restricts the admissible token set at generation time.
2. ADR-0023 — Proof Evidence. Boundary-only proof that the admissibility region is honored at the region intersection level but not yet at the destination-token level.
3. ADR-0024 — Inner-Loop Per-Rotor Admissibility. Adds the destination-side check: each per-step selection is re-evaluated by cga_inner(versor(candidate), relation_blade) > threshold, with honest refusal (InnerLoopExhaustion) when every admissible candidate is rejected. Six phases of implementation evidence (Phases 1-6) plus typed RefusalReason taxonomy.
4. ADR-0025 — Rotor / Frame Admissibility. Adds the rotor-side check: when a region carries a frame_versor, the rotor's effect on the field state (versor_apply(V, F)) is additionally checked against the frame for positivity in CGA inner product. Lives in generate/rotor_admissibility.py — a sibling-but-separate module, not in algebra/versor.py (would couple algebra to pack state) and not in field/propagate.py (forbidden normalization site).
5. ADR-0026 — Ranked Admissibility with Margin. Replaces static threshold tuning with a scale-invariant margin gate: admit iff the top blade-score exceeds the second by ≥ δ. Defaults to δ = 0.4. Falsifiable; characterization documented in docs/evals/phase5_stratified_findings.md.

Implementation evidence:

Phase	Commit	Tests
Phase 1 — pack-grounded fixtures	3940290	(rewrites)
Phase 2 — typed refusals + trace fold	310793a	+10
Phase 3 — ranked-with-margin gate	639e107	+13
Phase 4 — rotor / frame admissibility	542e13d	+11
Phase 5 — stratified mechanism-isolation	b664984	+20
Phase 6 — comparative demo vs baseline	a076506	+17
CLI surface (suite aliases + core demo)	36aad75	+14

Runtime contracts for the chain are pinned in docs/runtime_contracts.md (Refusal contract, Margin contract, Rotor admissibility contract sections).

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Pack-Layer chain — ADR-0027 through ADR-0045

ADR-0027 through ADR-0045 form the second coherent chain in the project: a load-bearing three-tier pack architecture (identity / safety / ethics) with deterministic remediation, full-stream audit, machine-readable telemetry, an operator-facing CLI readout, and an investor-facing walkthrough. Read in order:

Group	ADRs	What it adds
Identity	ADR-0027 / ADR-0028	Identity manifold loads from a swappable JSON pack at composition time. Pack carries surface_preferences that visibly drive hedging and claim strength.
Identity surface refinements	ADR-0030 / ADR-0031	Depth-language hedge; score-decomposition surface.
Safety	ADR-0029 / ADR-0032	Five universal safety boundaries unioned into every runtime manifold; SafetyCheck registry-of-predicates surface (observational).
Ethics	ADR-0033 / ADR-0034	Third pack tier — deployment commitments, swappable like identity but propositional like safety; EthicsCheck predicate surface.
Turn-loop wiring	ADR-0035	Both checks auto-invoked at end of every turn; verdicts attached to ChatResponse and TurnEvent.
Remediation tiers	ADR-0036 / ADR-0037 / ADR-0038	Safety-only typed refusal → per-commitment ethics refusal opt-in → hedge injection. Three tiers per ethics commitment: audit / hedge / refuse.
Audit completeness	ADR-0039	TurnVerdicts bundle + stub-path TurnEvent emission + refusal_emitted / hedge_injected flags. rt.turn_log covers every turn.
Machine + operator surfaces	ADR-0040 / ADR-0041	Structured JSONL sink with redact-by-default trust boundary; FanOutSink composer; core chat --show-verdicts operator readout.
Demo	ADR-0042	core demo audit-tour — four-scene investor-facing walkthrough; test-gated all_claims_supported flag.
Phase-2 measurements	ADR-0043	Pack-driven identity-divergence + refusal-calibration runners convert load-bearing claims into CI-enforced numbers across the three ratified packs; combined report at evals/results/phase2_pack_measurements.json.
Worked-example domain pack	ADR-0044	medical_clinical_ethics_v1 — six commitments across all three remediation tiers (refuse / hedge / audit); ratified end-to-end through scripts/ratify_ethics_pack.py; composes into the runtime manifold alongside the universal safety floor.
Long-context comparison	ADR-0045	CORE exact needle-in-a-haystack measurement at N ∈ {100, 1k, 10k, 100k} paired with frozen transformer baselines (Claude 2.1, GPT-4 Turbo 128k, Gemini 1.5 Pro, RULER); recall_pct=100 for CORE by construction.

Three sibling pack types compose into every runtime manifold:

identity.boundary_ids ∪ safety.boundary_ids ∪ ethics.commitment_ids → manifold.boundary_ids

Per-commitment ethics policy lives in two opt-in lists on the ethics pack: refusal_commitments (hard stop) and hedge_commitments (soft prepend), mutually exclusive at load time. Safety is always in scope for refusal; the floor never moves.

Verification surface:

Layer	Tests	Live demo
Identity packs	tests/test_identity_packs.py, tests/test_identity_surface_divergence.py	core demo audit-tour Scene 1
Safety pack + refusal	tests/test_safety_pack.py, tests/test_safety_check.py, tests/test_safety_refusal.py	core demo audit-tour Scene 2
Ethics pack + opt-ins	tests/test_ethics_packs.py, tests/test_ethics_check.py, tests/test_ethics_refusal_opt_in.py, tests/test_hedge_injection.py	core demo audit-tour Scene 3
Turn-loop verdicts + bundle	tests/test_turn_loop_verdicts.py, tests/test_turn_verdicts_bundle.py	core chat --show-verdicts
Telemetry sink	tests/test_telemetry_sink.py, tests/test_telemetry_fanout_and_summary.py	core demo audit-tour Scene 4
Audit tour gate	tests/test_audit_tour.py — asserts all_claims_supported	core demo audit-tour

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Pillar 1 → 2 → 3 coupling — ADR-0046

ADR-0046 extends the ADR-0022 → ADR-0026 forward-semantic-control chain by giving the AdmissibilityRegion a new, geometry-derived source: the PropositionGraph.

The graph was previously built after generate() ran, from the walk's nearest-node results — a post-hoc descriptor of what the field had already produced. ADR-0046 converts each graph's named-node versors into an AdmissibilityRegion before generate() is called, via the exact CGA top-k neighbourhood. The walk is now constrained by the proposition's geometric meaning rather than described by it after the fact.

geometry (CGA versor neighbourhood)
  → structure (PropositionGraph nodes)
    → propagation (AdmissibilityRegion fed to generate())

Three industry-facing demos under evals/industry_demos/ carry the falsifiable claims for this coupling. The exact-recall-at-scale claim remains under ADR-0045 / evals/long_context/, where it is measured on the real vault path and not duplicated under a weaker construction.

Layer	Tests	Live demo
Forward graph constraint	tests/test_graph_constraint.py — 8 tests	python -m evals.industry_demos.demo_01_forward_constraint
Geometry-driven identity	tests/test_identity_packs.py, tests/test_identity_surface_divergence.py	python -m evals.industry_demos.demo_02_geometry_drives_identity
Architectural determinism	tests/test_telemetry_sink.py, tests/test_telemetry_fanout_and_summary.py	python -m evals.industry_demos.demo_03_deterministic_audit

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Session Logs

Session logs record the decisions and rationale from individual working sessions. They are not ADRs — they are the narrative record that informed the ADRs.

Date	File
2026-05-12	SESSION-2026-05-12.md
2026-05-12 (addendum)	SESSION-2026-05-12-b.md
2026-05-12 (language packs)	SESSION-2026-05-12-language-packs-addendum.md
2026-05-13	SESSION-2026-05-13.md