Vocabulary

Facet uses a small vocabulary because parallel names become parallel concepts. These terms are normative: use the existing word when it serves, and add one only after a real product exposes a distinction the language cannot carry.

The Whole

The mass — also the stone — is the living product as one whole: evidence, reviewed current truth, attributable transitions, authority, uncertainty, capabilities, workspace, rails, and the operating pair. It is not the backend behind a separate application. The facets are faces of it.

The truth machine names what the mass does. It is the governed loop that turns incomplete and conflicting observations into the current best reviewed account on which people may responsibly act. It is not a component beside the mass, a generic runtime, or a claim to objective certainty.

The rails are the deterministic constraints inside that loop: evidence admission, typed operations, invariants, scoped authority, provenance, concurrency boundaries, approval gates, and atomic transition. Rails do not make probabilistic judgment correct. They keep its errors from silently becoming truth.

The Operating Pair

The pair is the operator and the Peer working as one operating unit inside the mass. The pair shares the same governed truth and acts through the same rails. It is not a model attached to a conventional workflow after the fact.

The operator is the human half of the pair. The operator holds whatever judgment, authorship, and consequential authority the product assigns to the human. Flow assigns every advance of current truth and every outside ask to its operator; another stone must declare its own gates.

The Peer is the AI half of the pair: the capable collaborator that occupies the mass’s workspace, carries context across the whole, and works through real tools. Peer names an office, not a particular model. A replacement engine should be able to inherit the office from durable reviewed state.

The bond is the durable working relationship between the operator and the stone, inhabited through the Peer. It is recoverable from evidence, decisions, graves, tool contracts, and reviewed operating context rather than living in a model’s weights or a vendor’s session history.

The harness is the working environment through which the Peer inhabits the mass: access to its records, files, tools, commands, context, and verification paths. A harness can be replaced. It is not a facet and this repository does not define one.

Presence means the pair is an operating participant rather than capability amortized once into a feature project. When work arrives, the Peer can inspect durable context, use governed tools, and resume from recorded state; the operator remains available at the declared judgment gates. Presence does not mean uninterrupted model uptime, infallibility, or a human watching every moment.

The Cut

A facet is the thinnest deliberate cut where the mass meets a person outside the bond. A worksheet, shipped edition, or focused form can be a facet. It is a face of the product, never an application standing in front of it.

A cut is the act of authoring a facet for a particular person or role. The question is not “what features belong on this surface?” but “who stands at this angle, what must reach them, and what must return?” The cut is an offered path, not a compulsory channel or a permanent assignment of one surface to one role. Coverage is measured by people and real encounters, not by symmetry between interfaces.

No interior means a facet owns no authoritative domain truth, parallel record, or second implementation of the business. It may hold transient interaction state — text someone is typing, an open panel, a local selection — but deleting it cannot damage the mass’s truth or history.

Thin by right means the facet does not encode speculative cases. The pair absorbs the unanticipated case when it arrives; repeated, observed mechanics may later harden into the rails. Thinness is the consequence of presence and a complete mass, not an excuse for an impoverished experience.

True or authored names the two outbound paths. A facet may show reviewed fact, including the labelled fact that a bounded source observed something, or an ask authored by the authority the product declares. It never invents an answer with a model at display time. Ordinary deterministic rendering is not the generation this rule forbids.

Disposable means truth never moved into the facet. Recutting or deleting a surface may remove a capability from an outside person, so the cut still matters; it does not erase the account the capability acts on. The same promise holds when a person ignores the cut, another outside person uses it, or evidence arrives through an existing channel: the mass remains whole.

Facet creep is a cut thickening into options, secondary views, settings, and state because it is trying to anticipate. It is the portal reflex returning one reasonable feature at a time.

The Truth Loop

Evidence is a preserved claim from a source, with provenance and bounded authority. Arrival, storage in an important system, model extraction, and confidence do not promote a claim into current truth.

A contribution is what a person outside the bond submitted across the boundary, whether through a facet or an existing channel. It is retained exactly as received when the medium permits and enters the mass as evidence. It never edits current truth directly.

Current truth is the current best reviewed account on which the people around this stone may responsibly act. It may contain uncertainty, conflict, or an explicit unknown. Corrigibility is part of the claim: a later transition can supersede it without erasing why it once stood.

A change is the attributable transition from one current account to its successor: exact before and after values, cited evidence, rationale, actor, authority, remaining uncertainty, and the state against which the decision was made. A coherent change advances whole or not at all.

An ask is a deliberate request for work from a person outside the bond. Detection may find a gap and the Peer may draft language, but detection does not silently inherit authority to impose an obligation. Flow’s operator authors every ask; another stone must declare its author.

A publication is an outward artifact whose state and exact content are preserved. Drafted, approved, sent, acknowledged, and incorporated are distinct events because reconstructing yesterday’s message from today’s truth would destroy the history of what crossed the boundary.

An encounter is one concrete crossing of that boundary: a package sent, a form submitted, an answer received, a correction acknowledged, or an existing channel carrying the same exchange. A facet may make the encounter excellent, but it is not what makes the encounter admissible. The cut may be disposable; the encounter is a fact and therefore remains in the mass.

Learning Without Anticipation

Promotion moves recurring mechanical labour from a Peer session into a deterministic read or drafter while leaving authority at the same gate. Flow evaluates promotion on the second recurrence. That count is a Flow heuristic, not universal doctrine; observed recurrence and unchanged authority are the candidate seam.

The portal reflex is the learned instinct to answer a need with standing infrastructure before asking whether presence can absorb it. Models display the reflex acutely because their training contains far more portals than living masses. Name the reflex; do not treat the name as proof that every surface is wrong.

A grave is the retained record of something real that was built and killed: what it was, what it cost, why it failed, and what boundary its death paid for. A hypothetical corpse teaches nothing. A prohibition without a grave still needs a reason.