The stack is the shape of absence.

The idea in one minute

Software learned to assume that no capable person would be present when the question arrived. Portals, dashboards, and workflow engines amortize scarce attention into machinery built in advance, heavy because it must encode future cases.

Facet begins after that assumption breaks. Put a bonded human–AI pair inside the product — full context, real tools, judgment gates intact — and the pair can absorb the case that actually arrives. The boundary can collapse to exactly what an outside person needs to act and what the product needs back.

The living whole is the mass, or the stone: a truth machine of evidence, reviewed current truth, attributable change, and the operating pair. Each contact surface is a facet: a worksheet, a shipped edition, a focused form. It owns no parallel truth and improvises nothing at display time. It is a face of the product, never another application in front of it.

Facet is doctrine, not a framework or runtime: a way to decide what to build and, more often, what to refuse.

Status: this is working doctrine from one proving implementation. Flow’s mass and coordinator cut are built; its coordinator and customer were each exposed to Flow on 2026-08-04. That is evidence of contact, not adoption or customer value. Flow-earned heuristics remain observations until another stone challenges them.

Where to start

If you want the idea at full strength — read the founding essay, The Facet. Everything else in this documentation is expansion and evidence.

If you need the language first — use the Vocabulary, especially presence, Peer, operator, bond, harness, and encounter.

If you want the machine behind the cut — read The Mass: the full evidence-to-truth loop, the record distinctions it preserves, the role of the pair, and why the grammar travels without becoming a universal schema.

If you’re skeptical — start with The Inversion, which makes the economic argument without the imagery, including what stays scarce when presence becomes abundant, and why that residue is exactly what this doctrine governs.

If you want the evidence and its limits — read Flow: The First Worked Stone. It separates what is implemented and exercised from what remains designed, unproved after first contact, or still a candidate for doctrine.

If you want to bring Facet into a workspace — use Bootstrap a Workspace. It provides a read-only commission for an existing product and a copyable AGENTS.md for a new one. The Peer Workspace explains what that front door must open onto.

If you want the cost behind a prohibition — visit the Graves, beginning with the reconciliation client Flow built, browser-verified, and deleted.