The principles family is a declared record store whose entries carry typed claims, and it is read cold by statement and never by citation

Context

adr-30 fixed the record's families and their homes. The principles family under the durable record holds the distilled cross-cutting principles, first class and packed by the lifeboat, and it is the only family with no frontmatter, no identifiers and no entry among the stores the schema gate walks: its entries are prose files keyed by filename.

The cold-reading design makes the knowledge record a read object in Iteration 2. Principle statements are what a project carries forward and sit on the cold side; the citations back to the decisions they were distilled from are derivational, which is the material the read block excludes. The design therefore asks for a projection rule rather than a path rule, and for four things on each entry: what kind of claim it makes, what it is a claim about, what comparison produced it, and what evidence it rests on.

itd-181 shipped the scope-condition disposition so that later work inherits only what held, and its fidelity verdict found that nothing consumes a disposition: a falsified condition blocks nothing. A principle resting on an assumption that delivery falsified is exactly the inheritance the disposition exists to prevent, and the principles family is where the check belongs.

Decision

The principles family becomes a declared record store, keyed by its filenames, with four frontmatter keys: claim_type in the design documents' vocabulary (criterion, causal, context), with mechanism, the shipped intent token for the causal kind, accepted on read as an alias for causal and written back as causal, never refused with a rename; reference (the entity the principle is about); comparison (what was compared to produce it); and evidence (the records it distils and the scope-condition identities it inherits). A key considered and declined is an explicit null; an absent key is a claim not carried; the two are never collapsed.

Population is forward-only. An entry carrying none of the four keys is untyped and reported as such at warning severity, never as wrong; an entry carrying any of them carries all four or states the null, at blocking severity. Nothing backfills an existing entry, on the same rule the origin and production-mode keys follow.

A principle is read cold by its statement and never by its citations. The include table projects the statement to a reading and withholds the four keys and every citation, and the manifest asserts the exclusion; the projection is admitted at every position but the comparative.

A principle inherits only what held. The record lint reports a principle whose evidence names a scope condition dispositioned as falsified, reports one resting on a narrowed condition with the narrowing, and reports one resting on an undispositioned condition as untested.

The lifeboat's principles contract carries the four keys when it distils, under a new schema version of its principles payload, so a packed lifeboat's principles arrive typed.

Alternatives Considered

1. Leave principles as prose and exclude them from readings. Keeps the family as it is and forfeits the Iteration 2 knowledge record. Rejected: the design schedules the extension and Step 9 has no other read object.
2. Type existing entries by hand in the same change. Writing a comparison the author never stated is a backfill and the record's population rule forbids it. Rejected; the untyped count is information about the family's age.
3. Mint identifiers for principles. Would make the family look like the others and cost every existing cross-reference its filename handle. Rejected: the slug is the identity, and the gate keys uniqueness on the rendered handle.

Consequences

• The schema gate walks one more store, with uniqueness keyed on the rendered handle for a slug-keyed family, and the lifeboat's own prn- derivation from decision identifiers is recorded as a different namespace that shares the grammar.
• The include table gains a projection resolution for a labelled opening paragraph, and the manifest's kind vocabulary gains principle, which moves the manifest schema version.
• The lifeboat principles payload moves to schema version 2, and the distiller agent's contract and changelog move with it.

Status note

Accepted by the maintainer on 2026-09-02, at the planning interview for the Iteration 2 intents, after each decision was checked against the design framework v4 and its readings companion v4 and found not to contradict them. Drafted as proposed and held there until that interview, because it changes the record's architecture and the lifeboat's contract, neither an agent's act.