Development record

Framing traces never enter the record, and automated reviewers never read them

adracceptedadr-50

Context

The brief-creation interview (itd-142) elicits more than it commits: at a conjectural question it widens the space to several candidate construals, and the human declines most of them; along the way the exchange accumulates framing traces — the phrasings tried, the construals rejected, the paths not taken. Where that residue lands is a trust question, not a storage question. If declined alternatives enter the committed record, every future reader — human or automated — re-litigates them; if automated reviewers can read the traces, review pressure reaches back into the elicitation and shapes what a human is willing to consider out loud. The interview's design settled this as the two-output rule; the rule outlives the interview surface, so it is recorded as its own decision.

Decision

Elicitation has exactly two outputs, and only one enters the record.

The brief and the ledger receive committed products only — content the human confirmed, with its provenance. Nothing tentative, nothing declined.
Declined alternatives and framing traces go to a local ledger side — the .abcd/.work.local/ tier, per-worktree and never committed. The exact store shape is the itd-142 spec's to fix; the tier is not.
Automated reviewers never read the local ledger side. No review agent, validator, or lint consumes framing traces — not as context, not as evidence, not as calibration data. A human may read their own traces; machinery may not.
The transcript is discarded once the committed products and the local ledger side are written. There is no third output.

Alternatives Considered

Commit the traces as evidence (a what-was-declined record beside the brief). Rejected: it converts every declined construal into a standing invitation to re-litigate, and it makes the elicitation performative — a human who knows every rejected phrasing is committed reviews their words instead of thinking.
Let reviewers read traces under a flag (opt-in review context). Rejected: the value of the rule is its unconditionality; a flag makes trace-visibility a negotiation, and the chilling effect returns the moment the flag exists.
Discard everything uncommitted (no local side at all). Rejected: the human's own traces have recall value to the human — the local tier preserves that without publishing anything.

Consequences

The brief stays a record of decisions, not deliberations — consistent with the brief's truth rule (everything in it is decided) and adr-5.
Brief invariant 14 states the rule where invariants live; itd-142 consumes it, and its acceptance criteria assert the boundary behaviourally.
The local ledger side joins the .abcd/.work.local/ tier's existing contract: per-worktree, gitignored, merge-conflict-free.
Any future reviewer or validator that wants elicitation context must be told no by design — a check that would benefit from reading traces is a check that must be redesigned to run on committed products.

Frontmatter

id	adr-50
type	adr
status	accepted
date	2026-08-22

.abcd/development/decisions/adrs/0050-framing-traces-never-enter-the-record.md
open on GitHub ↗ · commit history ↗

References5

adr-36Coverage blanks are a fillable lifecycle — authored is not extracted, and the interview is its own steprelated
adr-41Documents and ledgers never leave the user tier; a public citation requires both gatesrelated
adr-55The construal stands in the record; its history does notrelated
itd-142The brief-creation interview: abcd elicits a repository's brief in a staged conversation — narrative first, then frontier rounds that ask only what the record cannot yet settle, options at conjectural questions (at most three candidate construals, a ceiling not a target, with a null answer always available), and a per-item confirmation — distilling committed products into the brief and a ledger while the transcript is discarded. Entry is one door for both modes: a brownfield repository arrives pre-populated from embark probe coverage, provenance-stamped and still requiring confirmation; a greenfield repository is the same interview run from the all-blank coverage state. Command-shaped, because it mutates state — abcd ships zero skillsrelated
itd-143The brief gains a framing chapter under 01-product/ — the macro-why home: one section holds the project's framing, the why behind the why, and receives the brief-creation interview's committed framing products; the brief-lifeboat mapping gains the matching row so a lifeboat carries framing like any other sectionrelated

Referenced by1

adr-2609021016288378A reframe occasioned by a reading is a committed pointer to an event whose content stays local, and the frame it fingerprints is the framing as it presently stands, which adr-55 enumerates as three committed surfacesrelated

mentions5

adr-5Brief is the current state; no version label, no archive directory
dcn-26082200000000072026-08-22 — Interview-workstream records filed (the 2026-08-22 handover's
dcn-26082800000000042026-08-28 — Cold-reading workstream rulings adopted (facilitator; committed in design discussion, disclosed as a pre-tooling lapse): (1) the construal-admissibility extension of adr-50 files first — the construal as it presently stands is committed record and readable by automated readers, its revision history is not (adr-55 carries the full rules); the construal is sited as a brief section under 01-product/. (2) The reading record (type name ruled at (17)) is a distinct record type in the issue tier with a separate disposition record and its own disposition vocabulary — the five-state slate with availability by position, per (19); the existing issue states are not reused for it; status is the presence of the keyed disposition, never folder membership. (3) One closing reading run is scheduled over the same object set after dispositions, with interpretations fixed in advance: silence is weak evidence of settlement; an accepted-and-acted detection returning is a finding; a rejected-with-purpose detection returning bears on whether the purpose resolved the tension. Amnesia is proven by a repository eval, never by a case run. A clean opening run is recorded as a run with an empty item set; the cycle proceeds and no further reading is commissioned. (4) The supply-regime check is built now: a regime field on the output contract, validated at ingest; enforcement is the default, and degradation to record-and-flag happens only on observed noise, recorded. (5) Reading invocation carries no free text: position and target state only. (6) The lapse log is a value in capture's validated category list, not the source enum. (7) Elicitation: the articulation round produces one intent, the exit noting candidates; the escalation rule is adopted (a defaults question that turns out conjectural escalates to the options regime); a held working principle permits articulation to proceed with the mechanism recorded as an explicit nullity, flagged in the readiness summary. (8) From the readings design, agreed as proposed: the reading record carries a position-typed item body (one record type, four bodies — registrative, generative, explicative, evaluative); the selection criteria are a recorded discipline with the committed six-criterion slate, never supplied at invocation; the comparative reading's candidate set is the widening reading's pre-admission output, with admission following the comparative characterisation; the no-input-is-authoritative condition enters the blindness core (no document passed to a reading is the fixed side of any comparison), and the widening/entailment asymmetry over draft and planned intents is stated explicitly in the assembler's include list — both confirmed at the facilitator's review, 2026-08-28; the disposition-side recurs citation is adopted as the recorded form of warm recurrence recognition. (9) Ruled 2026-08-28 (revised the same day): the manifest is committed to the durable tier at `.abcd/development/readings/<run-id>/`, alongside the run record — a new record family; lifecycle selects the tier, and commit reference plus per-item hashes make the assembly re-runnable and diffable. (10) Adopted 2026-08-28: brief invariant 15 — reading contexts and the ledger never meet, the scribe is not a transcript consumer, and the session-transcript store is reached through one door by an enumerated allow list (custodian writes and reads; lifeboat session-hunting consult-only; session-separation metadata; opt-in memory curation); a new consumer is an invariant change, never merely a code path, and only the history core package touches the store's path, held by a boundary test. (11) Adopted 2026-08-28: the escalation-logging addition — every escalation in the elicitation interview is logged as data, which question and on what grounds. (12) Ruled 2026-08-28: run metadata's instrument identity comprises the model identity, the definition's content hash, and the assembler version. (13) Ruled 2026-08-28: kinds bind as stamped — the instrument trio as one bundle with a shared spec, the rest standalone, the two disciplines as disciplines. (14) Ratified 2026-08-28: the 2026-08-27 grill-pass resolutions, as implemented in the drafts. (15) Ruled 2026-08-28: warm transcript consultation proceeds with the redaction residue disclosed; transcript content is not quoted into committed records until the secret-scan work closes the residue. (16) Ruled 2026-08-28: the construal extension refines adr-50 — adr-50 stays accepted, the extension states the refinement, and adr-50's related_adrs gains the minted id at filing (adr-55). (17) Ruled 2026-08-28: the record type is the reading record (folder `issues/readings/<run-id>/`); "detection" stays the name of the Step-6 instrument and its registrative body. (18) Ruled 2026-08-28: pattern-named is an envelope field; the two assembler rules (no include names a directory containing a record family; a reading's object excludes what it exists to change) are adopted; the read-block eval also asserts the instrument's own prior outputs never reach a reading; where the widening reading returns fewer than two configurations, the comparative reading is not exercised and the outcome is recorded as such. (19) Ruled 2026-08-28 (R7): five disposition states with availability by position — admission is `accepted` (position lives on the envelope); declining a widening proposal is `declined`, never `rejected`; the grounds field is `disposition_grounds`, required on every state except `held`; the disposition record validates its state against the envelope's position. (20) Authorised 2026-08-28 (facilitator): the build session runs the intent → spec → ship ceremony autonomously for this workstream's filings — adoption, spec creation and approval, readiness, kind binding, shipped moves, and audit ingest — with every act logged; PR merges, reversal flags, new dependencies, and records outside the workstream remain human-gated. The autonomy is deliberate and is itself part of what the cycle observes; ownership of every act rests with the committing identity, per the provenance rules.
iss-2608221457127152brief 02-constraints/03-invariants.md carries a PLACEHOLDER/navigational-pointer banner over fourteen fully-stated invariants, two landed this week, and adr-50 names the file as where invariants live; the may-consolidate clause is the aspirational-maybe the same-day truth rule forbids.
iss-2610150749052356The generated ADR and drafts indexes dropped hand-written relationship notes the old rows carried ('refines adr-50' on adr-55, 'amends adr-19' and 'extends adr-19, adr-20' on adr-31, adr-39/adr-23 links on itd-22, a reframe note on itd-16), because a row is derived from the record's H1 and status only.