openprose__prose/spec/03-AuthoringPattern.md

OpenProse Authoring Pattern

How to write OpenProse for a conforming harness — the language layer beneath evented reconciliation.

The OpenProse corpus divides labor exactly, and each document maps to what ships:

• 01-Language.md — the Language & Framework, bundled as the SKILL: syntax, kinds, sections, compile model, std/co.
• 02-Harness.md — the Harness contract: what any conforming harness must do to serve these contracts (loop, invariants, the reconciler, memoization, forecast, receipts, composition). It answers what the runtime must do.
• 03-AuthoringPattern.md — this document, the Authoring Pattern: SKILL-bundled but harness-governed. Where the Harness doc says what the runtime does, this says what the author writes so the runtime can do it. It bridges the Language doc and the Harness doc and is the definitive guide to writing *.prose.md for a conforming harness.
• 00-Tenets.md — the constitution. When any document tensions with a tenet, the tenet wins.

The relationship is the same as the one between a language reference and an effective-style guide. The harness doc tells you the machine has memoization, forecast-gated quiescence, deterministic commit-gating, and receipt composition. This doc tells you how to write contracts so those mechanisms actually engage instead of degrading to "cron plus a prompt."

This file has three parts:

1. The ideal authoring pattern.
2. What the OpenProse skill implements today.
3. What must change in the skill before the pattern is fully authorable.

The single most important principle, stated once up front so the rest is read in its light:

The reactive paradigm does not change OpenProse syntax. It inverts which kind is the program. Every section, kind, and keyword the pattern needs already exists. What changes is doctrine: the responsibility is the top-level authored object, the render is where the work happens (there is no separate fulfillment system), and two contract sections (### Maintains and ### Continuity) carry a cost-and-reconciliation obligation they did not visibly carry before.

---

I. The Ideal Authoring Pattern

The inversion

01-Language.md settles the mental model: the responsibility is the program. A standing goal, written as durable intent, is the top-level authored object; everything else is derived from it.

The responsibility is the program.
A gateway is how the world reaches it.
A function is a helper one render calls; the DAG is how responsibilities compose.
Forme, the canonicalizer, and the VM are the substrate, never the unit of authoring.

The authoring consequence: you do not start by writing a system. You start by writing one sentence of durable intent and what makes it true — a ### Goal and a ### Maintains. A responsibility is served, not run, but that is not a limitation: "not directly runnable" means "continuously reconciled," which is the entire point. The render of a single responsibility still runs standalone (language sovereignty), so there is no lesser, non-executable artifact here.

The canonical contract

The unit of work is, at its smallest, one file: a kind: responsibility whose ### Maintains declares the truth to keep current. It grows only as the work demands:

File	kind:	What the author is really writing
The standing goal	responsibility	One ### Goal sentence + the ### Maintains world-model that makes it true (type, facets, canonicalization, postconditions)
Event ingress	gateway	How and when the world is allowed to wake the loop
A helper	function	A called, ephemeral computation a render invokes — ### Parameters → ### Returns

There is no separate "fulfillment system," no "sense service," no "verdict service," and no "ledger service": the render is the fulfillment, the canonicalizer is how change is sensed, gateCommit is the admissibility check, and the signed receipt ledger is the storage — all owned by the harness, not authored. A reader who understands the responsibility understands the program; the rest is how, and may change without the intent changing (invariant 1, at authoring time).

Authoring derived from the invariants

Each harness invariant produces a concrete, checkable authoring rule. This table is the spine of the pattern; the prose after it only elaborates.

Harness invariant	Authoring rule it imposes
1. Markdown is intent	The responsibility carries all semantic weight. Never push intent into a prompt or a tool config. If it matters, it is in ### Goal / ### Requires / ### Maintains.
2. Materiality is compiled and shared	Declare what counts as a material change as natural language inside ### Maintains — which fields matter, how they normalize, where the facets fall. The compile phase lowers that into a deterministic canonicalizer; you state the materiality, not the hash.
3. Adapters are the only reason homes differ	Author no host-specific logic in contracts. Declare needs in ### Tools / ### Environment by name only. The same contract must run local and cloud.
4. Activations are bounded	Never write a render that assumes it keeps running. No "while true," no in-session waiting for the next event. Continuity lives in the receipt ledger, not a session.
5. Cost scales with surprise	Write ### Maintains so "did anything material change?" is cheaply decidable — give the truth a stable content identity and facet it so an unrelated change wakes nobody. Declare freshness (valid_until) in ### Continuity so silent staleness still wakes the node. This is a rule authors often violate.
6. The commit gate is deterministic	State satisfaction as postconditions inside ### Maintains — deterministic where you can express a validator, self-attested by the render where it is semantic. There is no separate judge and no ### Criteria.
7. Receipts are content-addressed	Trust the harness's signed receipt ledger as the audit / composition / exit unit. Do not hand-roll a scratch log.
8. State is replayable and exitable	Keep all durable truth in the responsibility's ### Maintains world-model, in plain structured records. A reader must be able to take the contract and its trail to another harness.

Rule 1 — ### Goal is one standing-intent sentence

A goal is a state that should remain true, not a task or a deliverable. Not "triage the inbox," not "produce a report," but an invariant: "the research inbox is deduplicated, prioritized, and converted into action."

The test is no longer "could a judge score it" — there is no judge. The test is: can you name the maintainable truth and declare its shape in ### Maintains? If the sentence describes an activity rather than a state, rewrite it until it describes a state. A sentence whose truth has nothing observable to maintain against is the highest-value early signal: the first render fails, its receipt names the gap, and the contract author hears about it — front-loaded, then silent.

Rule 2 — ### Continuity declares the wake source; ### Maintains carries the materiality

These were once one rule; they are two jobs, and conflating them is a common authoring mistake.

### Continuity answers when, beyond an input change, this node should re-render:

• Input-driven (default). The node wakes when a subscribed ### Requires facet moves. You write nothing extra.
• Self-driven. The truth goes stale on its own. Declare a valid_until freshness window — "a stargazer count older than one business day is stale." When it lapses, the continuity clock mechanically moves the facet's fingerprint and wakes the node; you do not hand-write a cron.
• External-driven. A kind: gateway turns an ingress event (webhook, queue, schedule) into a wake.

The memoization half — what counts as a material change, and whether "nothing changed" is cheaply decidable — belongs in ### Maintains, not here. Write ### Maintains so an unchanged world produces an unchanged fingerprint: give the truth a stable content identity (a content hash, a max-timestamp, a revision) and facet it so an unrelated change wakes nobody. If the only way to know whether anything changed is to redo the full expensive render, you have written a contract whose cost scales with the clock, not surprise — say so deliberately (the node will run at freshness cadence), exactly as projection-only is a deliberate choice rather than a degenerate responsibility.

Rule 3 — satisfaction is a postcondition in ### Maintains, not a ### Criteria judge

There is no ### Criteria and no judge. State what "satisfied" means as postconditions inside ### Maintains:

• Deterministic where you can express it. "The release-notes file's last commit is newer than the latest merged PR touching src/" compiles into a validator the harness runs at commit. If it fails, the render commits nothing.
• Self-attested where it is semantic. Where the obligation cannot be reduced to a validator, the render must attest it satisfied its own ### Maintains before it signs. gateCommit fails closed: no attestation, no commit. (Part II: the deterministic gate is built but currently unwired, so the live commit rides the render's self-attestation until the compiled validators are threaded on.)

When the truth genuinely has nothing observable to maintain against, the render cannot satisfy its postcondition and writes a failed receipt naming the gap — routed to the contract author. Author postconditions expecting this on the first few activations; that front-loading is the promise, not a defect. There is no up/drifting/down/blocked status to encode and no "undecidable" enum — the failed receipt and its reason carry it.

Rule 4 — ### Invariants draws the actuation boundary

### Invariants (the section that absorbs the old ### Constraints) is where the author quarantines world-mutation — the authoring-time expression of the render/commit split: a render may act, but only the canonicalized published truth re-enters the memo, and ### Invariants is where the author bounds what the render may touch — the actuation boundary the harness is to enforce at the render/commit split. (Part II: authored but not yet lowered into the render.)

Two boundary shapes recur:

• Full actuation. The render may mutate the world (send the email, update the briefing, write the register). ### Invariants bounds how (rate, scope, prohibited actions, "leave the final send to a human").
• Projection-only. The author forbids all world-mutation except writing the published truth itself: an observe-only overseer, a dashboard that must stay true, an audit that watches but never touches. Say so explicitly: "the only writable surface is the published truth; never modify, signal, or write into the observed system."

A projection-only contract is not a degenerate responsibility. It keeps every cost and audit property; it simply declines the reconcile-the-world payoff. Choose it deliberately, not by backing into it.

Rule 5 — write ### Maintains so the harness can memoize

Authors most often write the anti-pattern: a render that re-derives everything every time. The fix is not a service decomposition — it is shaping ### Maintains so the dumb reconciler can skip. The reconciler keys each render on the 3-tuple (contract_fingerprint, input_fingerprints, freshness_epoch); your leverage is to make the input fingerprints move only on real change. (A harness may realize the freshness term as a forecast self-receipt over a 2-tuple key — identical decision semantics; see 02-Harness.md Quiescence.)

1. Give the truth a stable content identity. The canonicalizer fingerprints the published truth; make sure an unchanged world yields an unchanged fingerprint (drop volatile fields — a re-poll timestamp, a request id — from materiality). This is what lets the reconciler skip before any render runs (quiescence behavior 1).
2. Facet the truth. Split ### Maintains into #### parts so a consumer subscribing to one facet is not woken by a change in another (quiescence behavior 3). A diamond reconverges to a single wake.
3. Declare freshness. Put valid_until windows in ### Continuity so silent staleness still wakes the node (quiescence behavior 2).

Variable-depth work, where you genuinely need it, is ordinary control flow inside the one render — a call to a function for an expensive sub-step, gated by an if in ### Execution. It is not a "judge tier" and not an autowired service graph.

Rule 6 — composition is subscribing to an upstream facet, not a new primitive

"Responsibility B depends on responsibility A" needs no new syntax. B names the upstream facet in ### Requires; Forme matches it to A's ### Maintains facet and draws the subscription edge. B's render wakes on A's receipt when that facet's fingerprint moves — identical to consuming a webhook. Two authoring obligations make it safe:

• Reference, don't embed. B's ### Requires names A's responsibility id / facet as a declared subscription, not a copied value.
• Pin revision and trust. For cross-trust-domain composition, pin which revision of A you accept and an acceptable signer set; unpinned composition is a supply-chain attack the author closes, not the runtime. (Part II: v1 "signed" is meaning-layer chain-consistency over a null signer; the cryptographic byte-hash signer is deferred.)

Freshness needs no special authoring: each facet carries its own valid_until, so a stale upstream facet's fingerprint lapses and wakes B through the ordinary path. There is no transitive-freshness function to shape and no per-cycle staleness comparison to hand-write.

This is how a downstream responsibility consumes an upstream one — a subscription edge, not a special case.

Patterns that fit the reactive model

The std pattern library is use-case agnostic, but a subset recurs in reactive contracts and should be the author's default vocabulary:

Pattern	Reactive role
fan-out, map-reduce	Sensing a wide world cheaply, in parallel, inside one render
guard	A precondition gate before an expensive call or a world-mutating step
worker-critic, proposer-adversary	A built-in check a render runs before it attests and commits
oversight	The actor / observer / arbiter split — the canonical projection-only shape

These coordinate calls to functions inside a render; none is a separate node or an autowired graph. Depth — running a critic only on the uncertain branch — is ordinary ### Execution control flow.

A worked example: the competitor-activity monitor

The running example across the harness and world-model specs: keep a current picture of a set of competitors, where downstream consumers care about different parts of that picture and should wake only when their part moves.

The responsibility (the whole program):

---
name: competitor-activity-monitor
kind: responsibility
id: 067NC4KG01RG50R40M30E20918
---

### Goal

The activity of the tracked competitors — their funding, hiring, and product
launches — is current.

### Requires

- `competitors`: the watchlist (names + domains) this monitor tracks.
- `pages` from `competitor-sources-gateway`: the latest fetched source content,
  staged with a cheap content identity so unchanged sources don't wake the
  extraction.

### Maintains

A `competitor-activity` world-model with three independently-subscribable parts:

#### funding
Rounds, amounts, investors, and dates. Material: a new or changed round.
Immaterial: re-ordering, prose phrasing, the timestamp of the last poll.

#### hiring
Open roles and headcount signals by function. Material: a role appears or
closes, or headcount crosses a band. Immaterial: list order, exact view counts.

#### product-launches
Announced launches and ship dates. Material: a new launch or a moved date.

Postcondition: every entry cites the source it was derived from; an entry with
no observable source is not committed (the render attests this).

### Continuity

- Input-driven: wake when `pages` (new staged source content) or the
  `competitors` watchlist changes. Unchanged sources leave the `pages`
  fingerprint still, so the expensive extraction memo-skips at zero render tokens.
- Self-driven: each part carries a `valid_until` of +1 business day as a safety
  net, so a silently stale part is re-checked even if the gateway missed a change.

### Invariants

- Read-only on the outside world: never contact a competitor or alter a source.
- The only writable surface is the `competitor-activity` world-model.

### Tools

- cli:fs-read   # reads staged source content; the gateway owns web-fetch

The gateway that feeds it — cheap, deterministic ingress with a stable content identity, so the monitor's render only fires on real change:

---
name: competitor-sources-gateway
kind: gateway
id: 067NC4KG01RG50R40M30E2091A
---

### Goal

The latest fetched source content for each tracked competitor is staged for
extraction — fetched and staged only, never interpreted here (extraction is the
monitor's render).

### Continuity

external-driven: the competitor sources cannot push, so the gateway re-checks
them on a *freshness-paced* cadence — a `valid_until` of +6h on the staged
`pages`, not a blind heartbeat (invariant 5).

### Maintains

#### pages
The fetched source content per competitor, normalized to its stable main text.
Material: the content hash of a competitor's normalized text changed. Immaterial:
fetch timestamp, request ids, response headers, ads, and boilerplate.

### Schedule

- Re-fetch each competitor's funding, careers, and product pages when the staged
  `pages` freshness window (+6h) lapses — the freshness-paced recheck for sources
  that cannot push, not a fixed-interval poll.

The gateway does the cheap, deterministic half (fetch + normalize + hash); the monitor does the expensive, semantic half (extract funding / hiring / launches), and only when the gateway's pages fingerprint actually moves.

A downstream consumer subscribes to one facet, and wakes only on that facet:

---
name: weekly-competitor-brief
kind: responsibility
id: 067NC4KG01RG50R40M30E20919
---

### Requires

- `funding` from `competitor-activity-monitor`   # subscribes to ONE facet

### Maintains

A short brief summarizing the latest funding activity for the watchlist.

### Continuity

- Self-driven: a `valid_until` of +7 days, so the brief refreshes weekly even
  if funding stays quiet.

What an ideal harness does with this:

• A gateway poll that finds no changed source content leaves the pages fingerprint unmoved, so the monitor's extraction memo-skips at zero render tokens (the gateway pays only a cheap, non-LLM fetch + hash) and the brief never wakes — cost scales with surprise. When sources change but the funding facet does not, the monitor renders, re-derives an unchanged funding fingerprint, and still leaves the brief asleep.
• A new hiring signal moves only the hiring fingerprint; the brief subscribes to funding, so it stays asleep — facets make subscription selective.
• When funding's valid_until safety net lapses, the continuity clock advances the monitor's freshness epoch and wakes it with a zero-token self-receipt; the monitor re-extracts from the latest staged pages, and only real news propagates to the brief.
• A render that cannot cite a source for an entry fails its postcondition, commits nothing, and leaves a failed receipt — the prior truth stands.

Two of these are ideal harness behavior the contract is authored to, not yet delivered as of the reference harness 0.3.3 (see the repository README under Harnesses): forecast-paced freshness arming (that harness's serve polls a flat interval) and the gateway's ### Schedule cadence (dropped by its compiler) are Part II deferrals — the contract above is correct; the harness climbs to it.

No kind: system, no ### Services, no judge, no ledger service: the render maintains the world-model, the canonicalizer senses change, gateCommit gates the commit, and the signed receipt ledger is the trail.

Anti-patterns

Each is the natural task-loop instinct and why it breaks an invariant:

• Modeling the work as a graph of services instead of one responsibility. Inverts the model; the wiring becomes the source of intent (breaks invariant 1). Start from the ### Maintains truth, not a system.
• A render with a loop until done that waits for events in-session. That is a long-running agent loop, not bounded activations (breaks invariant 4).
• A ### Maintains with no material/immaterial split, so every re-poll looks changed. The canonicalizer's fingerprint moves every cycle; the reconciler can never skip and cost scales with the clock (breaks invariant 5). This is the most common and most expensive mistake.
• A contract whose only "did anything change" test is the full render, written as if it memoizes. Not an invariant-5 correctness break (the continuity clock still makes it safe) but a false cost claim. The honest form names the absence of a cheap identity and accepts freshness-cadence cost deliberately — exactly as projection-only is a deliberate choice, not a degenerate responsibility.
• Hand-coding a cadence in ### Execution instead of declaring the wake in ### Continuity (an input subscription or a valid_until). It hides the schedule from the harness and defeats forecast-paced quiescence (breaks invariant 5).
• Putting volatile fields in ### Maintains — a poll timestamp, a request id, a re-ordered list — so the fingerprint moves on noise (breaks invariant 5).
• Consuming another responsibility's value by copying it into the contract. Not a verifiable, revision-pinned subscription; a supply-chain hole (breaks Rule 6 composition and invariant 7's content-addressed receipts). Name the facet in ### Requires instead.
• "Swarm of subagents that continuously watches." The cron-plus-prompt shape the reconciler replaces. The reactive form is: a subscribed input or a lapsed valid_until wakes one bounded render; nothing watches in between.

Precedence for authors

When authoring rules tension, follow the harness precedence stack:

correctness  >  safety  >  cost  >  interrupt-minimization

If a correct, safe contract surfaces more failed receipts to the author early, accept them. If making a contract cheaper would make it unsafe (dropping a postcondition on a high-stakes goal so it commits without checking), pay the cost. Silence is a target, never a constraint the other rules bend around.

---

II. What The OpenProse Skill Implements Today

The current model in Part I — intelligent compile (per-node canonicalizer + Forme topology + postcondition validators, fired only on a contract-set change) over a dumb deterministic run (compare (contract_fingerprint, input_fingerprints) → skip / render / gateCommit / propagate) — is the model the shipped skill authors against. This section is the conformance ledger: what the skill routes today, measured honestly against that pattern.

The skill's responsibility-runtime.md and concepts/{responsibility,reconciler}.md are already written to this model; the retired judge/verdict/status/pressure/fulfillment vocabulary is gone from the authoring surface, not merely deprecated, and the legacy prose CLI binary has been removed (the language is embodied by the SKILL in-session).

The authoring surface that already exists

The headline finding still holds: the reactive pattern requires no new syntax — but the syntax it requires is the current one. The skill routes the kinds and sections Part I names, and only those.

Pattern element	Skill support today
kind: responsibility with ### Goal / ### Requires / ### Maintains / ### Continuity / ### Invariants (+ ### Tools / ### Shape / ### Runtime)	Present and canonical (concepts/responsibility.md, contract-markdown.md); id: is tooling-minted and stable across name:/filename renames
kind: function with ### Parameters / ### Returns — a stateless called helper (the former service)	Present; run as a lone render with no Forme phase
kind: gateway — sugar for an external-driven responsibility; Forme's entry-point set	Present; a conforming harness's serve registers it and stages ingress (fetch → extract → stage + a durable idempotency cursor)
kind: pattern / kind: test	Present; patterns expand at compile time, tests route to the in-session prose test semantic (a harness owns no test verb)
Facets: #### parts under ### Maintains — name = fingerprint unit + subscription symbol; atomic default	Present and facet-granular propagation is live in production (the v2 named-parts model); a downstream subscribed to one facet does not wake when another moves
### Maintains as the world-model schema doing four jobs (type, canonicalization spec, facets, postconditions)	Present; the postconditions live inside ### Maintains, compiled to validators (there is no separate ### Criteria section — it was removed)
### Continuity as the structural wake-source declaration (input / self / external)	Present; self-driven recheck and the gateway entry point are both wired
### Execution ProseScript for variable-depth work inside one render	Present — an if-gated call to a function is the depth mechanism, not a judge tier
Compile as SKILL-loaded sessions (Forme / canonicalizer / postcondition) → deterministic lowering → content-addressed IR cache	Present; a .prose set mounts without hand-authoring via a true semantic Requires ↔ Maintains match
Run: dumb reconciler — memo-skip on unmoved (contract_fp, input_fp), single-flight + coalescing, failure = no-commit, propagate only on a rendered moved fingerprint	Specified (02-Harness.md The canonical loop); the reference harness realizes it, including restart survival (truth + ledger survive a fresh process)
gateCommit: deterministic postcondition validators + render self-attestation of ### Maintains; receipt status in {rendered, skipped, failed}	Partial; no judge, no verdict, no status enum — but the commit rides the render's self-attestation: in the reference harness 0.3.3 the deterministic gateCommit(...) validators are built and tested yet have zero live callers (02-Harness.md invariant 6)
Content-addressed, chain-verifiable receipt ledger; cost = tokens.fresh vs tokens.reused + surprise_cause	Present (the reference harness chain-verifies and tamper-detects the ledger and renders "cost scales with surprise" from it)
Composition: a downstream responsibility names an upstream facet in ### Requires; Forme draws the subscription edge	Present; the reconciler reads the topology edges to resolve propagation

The skill can already express a reactive program end to end in the current model: one responsibility with a faceted ### Maintains, a gateway for ingress, a function helper for an expensive sub-step, an actuation boundary in ### Invariants, postcondition-gated commit, and a composition edge that is a real subscription rather than a copied value. Two honest caveats the author must hold (see limits): the ### Invariants actuation boundary is authored but not yet harness-enforced — it is never lowered into the render, so it constrains the model only as prose; and the postcondition gate currently rides the render's self-attestation, not the deterministic gateCommit(...) validators.

Current authoring limits

Part I states the pattern as an unqualified north star. This is where authoring reality is honest, rule by rule.

Authoring rule (Part I)	State	What the author must currently know
1. Intent lives in the responsibility	Conformant	Fully authorable today
2. Materiality stated semantically in ### Maintains	Conformant (authoring)	The author states materiality in prose; it is lowered to a deterministic canonicalizer. The lowering runs only spec→code — a compile session reads the ### Maintains prose and emits the canonicalization spec, which the deterministic producer compiles. There is no .prose parser; compile is sessions, not a grammar
3. No host-specific contract logic	Conformant (authoring); harness resolution deferred	### Tools (cli: / mcp:), ### Environment, and ### Skills are authored name-only and never install or contact at compile — but the reference harness does not yet consume them: compile reads only ### Requires/### Maintains/### Continuity/### Execution, and the render runs a fixed built-in toolset, so declared capability names are inert today. Fail-closed resolution/enforcement of the declared surface is a forward harness item
4. Bounded activations	Conformant	Idiomatic; the "loop until done" anti-pattern is author error, not a skill gap
5. Written for memoization / variable depth	Conformant	The reconciler's skip on (contract_fp, input_fp) is live (cost scales with surprise, including an immaterial-churn re-poll that still skips); facet selectors are live; depth is an if-gated call in ### Execution. The author's leverage is real today
6. Composition via a subscribed upstream facet	Conformant (meaning-layer)	A downstream names the upstream facet in ### Requires and Forme wires the edge; receipts are content-addressed and the chain is verifiable. The cryptographic signer is a null-state — v1 "signed" is meaning-layer chain-consistency, not a byte-hash — so cross-trust-domain pinning to a signer set is not yet enforceable
7. Receipts as the audit / composition / exit unit	Conformant	The ledger is a harness-chosen receipt ledger layout (the reference harness ships a flat receipts.json), content-addressed, chain-verifiable; cost (fresh/reused/surprise_cause) and status are first-class. No hand-rolled scratch log is needed
8. Replayable and exitable	Conformant	Contract + world-model + ledger are plain and portable; a replay viewer replays a saved run with no running harness and zero key

Honest current limits for authors

• ### Continuity self-driven recheck exists, but serve's freshness clock arms nothing by default. The bridge is real (a lapsed valid_until flips a fact's status, moves the facet fingerprint, and wakes the node — a zero-token fingerprint move, not a model re-render), and the SDK computes each node's soonest next_self_recheck. But as of the reference harness 0.3.3, its serve daemon's freshness reader defaults to none and no node emits valid_until by default, so it sleeps a flat --poll-interval (default 60s) and does the fixed-interval work the ideal forbids. Forecast-paced / adaptive idle is the deferred next step. Declare valid_until now; the cadence tightens later without a source change.
• The ### Invariants actuation boundary is authored, not enforced. The authored rate/scope/prohibited-action quarantine is never lowered into the render — neither compiled, attested, nor harness-checked — so it constrains the model only as prose, bounded in practice by the cwd-rooted workspace sandbox and the turn cap. There is also no world-mutation actuation sink yet (render tools are fs/shell over a private workspace; connectors are read-only ingress).
• A gateway's ### Schedule cadence is not yet honored. Gateways poll external sources, but a per-gateway ### Schedule (e.g. "every 6h") is dropped by the compiler as of the reference harness 0.3.3; cadence is that harness's flat serve poll interval. Declare the intended schedule now; it binds once the compiler carries it.
• The deterministic commit gate is unwired. compilePostconditions(...) runs on the compile path, but as of the reference harness 0.3.3 the gate that evaluates it, gateCommit(...), has zero live callers; the commit rides the render's ### Maintains self-attestation (02-Harness.md invariant 6).
• Serve ingress is local cron-poll + HTTP only. Gateway poll connectors and an HTTP trigger surface ship; queues, file watches, and provider subscriptions do not. A worktree/planning-dir watcher must use a poll ### Continuity today and note the intended file-watch form.
• The cryptographic signer is a null-state, and the dependency edge pins no signer set. Composition pins a content-addressed revision and is chain-verifiable at the meaning layer, but the topology edge carries no acceptable-signer-set pin, and the byte-hash signer that would enforce one is deferred. Functionally adequate within one trust domain; cryptographically weaker than the ideal across domains.
• Materiality is authored, not yet inferred. The author writes the material/immaterial split in ### Maintains prose and the compile session lowers it. The skill does not infer facets or materiality from the truth's shape; that inference loop is deferred. The store also does not materialize a per-facet published/<facet>/… subtree on disk (it persists published.json
  • content-addressed blobs) — facet-granular propagation holds regardless; only the on-disk subtree mirror is absent.

The pattern is fully writable today, in the current model. Its remaining climb is harness cadence and cryptographic hardening (forecast-paced rechecks, richer ingress adapters, the byte-hash signer), not retired vision. Author to the ideal; do not claim the runtime delivers the deferred items it does not.

---

III. What Must Change In The Skill

The retired-model framings are gone: the skill already routes the current kinds and sections, the examples are migrated, and concepts/{responsibility,reconciler}.md teach the no-judge model. What remains is the climb from "fully authorable in the current model" to "every Part I payoff is also delivered" — a mix of finishing the authoring story for the newest sections and the genuine harness deferrals.

1. Finish the facet authoring story

Facet propagation is live and the named-parts model is canonical, but two seams are open:

• Facet inference is deferred. Today the author writes the #### parts and the material/immaterial split by hand. The skill should eventually offer a lint that flags an under-faceted ### Maintains (one giant atomic truth whose consumers clearly want selectors) — and, post-v1, an inference pass that proposes facets from the truth's shape.
• The on-disk subtree mirror is absent. The store fingerprints each facet's material field-paths and persists published.json + content-addressed blobs; it does not materialize a published/<facet>/… subtree. Author doctrine should not promise a subtree on disk — describe facets as the subscription and fingerprint unit, which is what actually ships.

2. Complete the no-judge postcondition doctrine in contract-markdown.md

### Maintains now carries four jobs (type, canonicalization, facets, postconditions) and ### Continuity is a structural wake-source declaration. These are documented in concepts/responsibility.md; contract-markdown.md should mirror the load they bear:

• ### Continuity is the author's input to memoization and cadence — name the freshness referents (valid_until) and the wake sources (input / self / external), and make "nothing changed" cheaply observable.
• Postconditions are the author's commit gate. State them as observable referents; when the truth has nothing observable to maintain against, that is an expected, high-value failed receipt routed to the author — never a blocked/drifting status enum (those are retired).
• The failed receipt that names the gap and routes it to the author depends on the harness widening the durable receipt with as_of, a reason, and an author-addressing field (02-Harness.md Open specification items §1); until that lands, the doctrine is authorable but the routed reason is dropped at commit. Author to it now.

3. Land the materiality lowering's prose→spec half

Compile runs as SKILL-loaded sessions and the spec→code canonicalizer lowering is real (a compile session emits the canonicalization spec; the deterministic producer compiles it). The remaining work is hardening the prose→spec step — reading the author's ### Maintains materiality prose into the spec reliably — so that "state the materiality, not the hash" is trustworthy across more contract shapes. This is a compile-session quality effort, not a new grammar; there is no .prose parser to build.

4. Wire the deterministic commit gate

The author states satisfaction as postconditions inside ### Maintains, and the compile phase lowers them to deterministic validators (compilePostconditions runs on the compile path). But as of the reference harness 0.3.3, the gate that would evaluate them at commit, gateCommit(...), has zero live callers — the commit rides the render's own ### Maintains self-attestation. So the author's postconditions are compiled but not yet the enforced commit gate. Threading the compiled validators onto the live commit step (02-Harness.md invariant 6) makes Rule 3's "no attestation, no commit" a deterministic guarantee rather than a render self-report. The author writes postconditions to it now; the enforcement tightens harness-side.

5. Lower and enforce the ### Invariants actuation boundary

Rule 4's actuation quarantine is authored prose today: ### Invariants declares the rate/scope/prohibited-action bounds, but the section is never lowered into the render — it constrains the model only as prose, bounded in practice by the cwd-rooted workspace sandbox and the turn cap, with no world-mutation actuation sink. Lowering it into the render (02-Harness.md Metaphor, seam 2) makes a projection-only contract's "the only writable surface is the published truth" a harness-enforced guarantee rather than an author's request. Author the boundary now; it binds once the harness lowers it.

6. Forecast-paced continuity cadence

The self-driven recheck path is wired (freshness-lapse → synthetic self-receipt, a zero-token fingerprint move), but the serve loop of the reference harness 0.3.3 polls it on a flat interval. The deferred work is arming each node's soonest next_self_recheck off its freshness so an idle harness sleeps to the next real expiry instead of waking every interval — the forecast-paced quiescence Part I implies. The same step is owed for a gateway's declared ### Schedule, which the compiler drops as of the reference harness 0.3.3 (so the gateway runs on the flat serve poll, not its authored cadence); honoring it as a freshness-paced cadence rides with this work. The author already writes the valid_until (and the ### Schedule) that feeds it; the cadence tightens harness-side, without a source change.

7. Richer serve ingress adapters

The reference harness's serve supports local cron-poll and HTTP, plus gateway poll connectors with a durable idempotency cursor. Queues, file watches, provider subscriptions, and webhook authentication remain later runtime phases. Until they land, a file-watch-shaped responsibility is authored as a poll ### Continuity; the intended ingress form should be noted in the contract so it migrates cleanly.

8. The cryptographic signer (cross-trust-domain composition)

The receipt ledger is content-addressed and chain-verifiable, and the signer is an explicit null-state ({ scheme: "none", null_reason: ... }; the signature union ships only the null branch). v1 "signed" means meaning-layer chain-consistency. The deferred milestone is the cryptographic byte-hash signer, after which a downstream can pin an acceptable signer set in ### Requires and have it enforced — closing the cross-trust-domain supply-chain edge that is, today, the author's discipline rather than the runtime's guarantee.

Definition of done for the authoring layer

• contract-markdown.md documents ### Continuity as the cadence/memo input and ### Maintains postconditions as the commit gate, with the retired-status-enum doctrine explicit.
• A facet under-faceting lint exists; doctrine never promises an on-disk published/<facet>/… subtree.
• The prose→spec materiality lowering is hardened across the example corpus.
• The compiled postconditions are wired onto the live commit (gateCommit), so the author's ### Maintains postconditions are the enforced commit gate, not only the render's self-attestation.
• The ### Invariants actuation boundary is lowered and harness-enforced, so a projection-only contract's "only the published truth is writable" is a guarantee, and the failed receipt carries the routed reason.
• Serve arms next_self_recheck (forecast-paced cadence) so an idle harness sleeps to the next real expiry.
• The cryptographic signer lands and a pinned signer set is enforceable for cross-trust-domain composition.

Open authoring items

Deferred by design, tracked so they are neither invented nor dropped:

1. The fixpoint (topology-as-responsibility). Mounting the compile-phase renders — Forme above all — as ordinary nodes so the reconciler wakes them on a contract-set-change receipt, and the system maintains itself, is the closing recursion. It is post-v1 by design; v1 runs compile as a batch step on contract change with the topology a fixed input per scheduling epoch. This is the deliberate deferral, not an oversight.
2. Facet / materiality inference. The author states facets and materiality today; an inference loop that proposes them from the truth's shape is v-next.
3. Ledger compaction. A signed-snapshot-plus-truncate path for high-churn nodes is deferred; today the ledger is the full append-only trail.
4. The default valid_until freshness projector for serve. A first-class serve-time projector that surfaces soonest-expiry across nodes (the input to adaptive idle) rides with the forecast-paced cadence work above.

02-Harness.md says what the machine must do. 03-AuthoringPattern.md says what to write so it does it. The pattern is fully writable now in the current model; its full power lands as the harness climbs from flat-poll continuity and a null-state signer to forecast-paced rechecks and a cryptographic chain — and, last, to the fixpoint. Author to the ideal, document the climb honestly.