Development record

The construal stands in the record; its history does not

adracceptedadr-55

Context

adr-50 settled the two-output rule for elicitation: committed products enter the record, framing traces stay on a local ledger side no automated reviewer reads. As stated, its bars reach further than its purpose. The purpose was to protect deliberation — what a human was willing to consider out loud — from review pressure and re-litigation. But "framing material" covers two things adr-50 did not separate: the framing as it presently stands (the construal the framing chapter states, the glossary's committed terms, the committed scope), and the history of how it came to stand (declined construals, superseded terms, the reasoning that settled a terminological dispute). Read strictly, adr-50 makes the first inadmissible along with the second — which would leave a widening reading (itd-86's cold reading at the framing position) nothing legitimate to read against, and would make the framing chapter (itd-143) an oddity: a committed brief section automated readers must pretend not to see.

Decision

Two separate rules, both unconditional.

Record admissibility. The construal as it presently stands is committed record: the framing section's statement, the glossary's committed terms, committed scope and vocabulary — products the human confirmed, with provenance. Declined construals, superseded terms, the reasoning that settled a terminological dispute, and every other framing trace remain local-ledger content, per-worktree and never committed.
Reader access. Of framing material, automated readers — the cold reading included — may read committed products, and only those; the non-framing items a reading sees (shipped intents, disciplines, specs) are admitted by their own records, not by this rule. Nothing automated reads the local side: not as context, not as evidence, not as calibration data, under no flag. A human may read their own traces; machinery may not.

adr-50's remaining points carry forward unchanged: the transcript is discarded once both outputs are written, and there is no third output. The line moves; its unconditionality does not.

Alternatives Considered

Keep adr-50's line and drop the framing-position reading. Rejected: the value of a blind reader at the framing surface is exactly coverage of what familiarity smooths over (itd-86's case); dropping it protects the deliberation by discarding the benefit the protection exists to enable.
Glossary-only admissibility (readers see committed terms, never the framing statement). Rejected: the glossary is the framing's fingerprint, not its statement — a reading against the fingerprint alone reconstructs the frame by inference, which is less accurate and no less intrusive.
Reader access under a flag. Rejected again, on adr-50's own ground: unconditionality is the value; a flag makes trace-visibility a negotiation and the chilling effect returns the moment the flag exists.

Consequences

adr-50 stays accepted; this ADR refines it (relation ruled 2026-08-28), and brief invariant 14 is amended in the same change to cite both. At filing, adr-50's related_adrs gains this ADR's minted id.
The cold-reading input assembler's include list cites this decision for every framing item it admits; its exclusion list cites rule 2 for the local side, and the read-block eval asserts the exclusion on fields.
The glossary is the residual risk. A settled term is often the residue of a dispute, so admitting committed terms admits that residue in compressed form. The discipline falls on whoever writes the term — the committed entry carries the meaning, never the argument — and a breach is a lapse-log entry, not something this rule can catch mechanically.
Grounds (recorded here rather than in a side memo, pre-tooling): the extension is preferred to dropping the reading because the reading is the point; it is preferred to glossary-only because inference from a fingerprint is a worse reader than sight of the statement.

Frontmatter

id	adr-55
type	adr
status	accepted
date	2026-08-28

.abcd/development/decisions/adrs/0055-the-construal-stands-in-the-record-its.md
open on GitHub ↗ · commit history ↗

References4

adr-51An intent can declare its mechanism claim and its scope conditionsrelated
itd-86abcd Can Read Its Own Design Documents As A Stranger Wouldrelated
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 by5

adr-50Framing traces never enter the record, and automated reviewers never read themrelated
adr-58A reading is commissioned about something, so the invocation takes a scoperelated
adr-2609021016272867The comparative reading receives one widening run's candidates, a positional exception to the prior-run exhaust, with the run derived from the record and no operand addedrelated
adr-2609021016275803No session holds both a reading and the ledger, and a per-run context stamp is how the record shows itrelated
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

mentions15

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.
dcn-26090200000000032026-09-02 — adr-2609021016272867, adr-2609021016275803, adr-2609021016270132 and adr-2609021016288378 are adopted (maintainer, at the same interview, each checked against the framework and the companion first). adr-2609021016272867: the comparative reading receives two body fields of one named widening run's items as the single exception to the prior-run exhaust, through a fourth closed operand naming the run; the maintainer chose the named operand over a derived selection because two widening runs coexist after the closing run, on the condition that an absent operand lists the runs the operator may choose from. adr-2609021016275803: per-run context stamps and a session-separation check that reports held-for-what-was-seen or unobserved, never clean; `scribe assemble` and `scribe ingest` with a ledger-only allow list derived from the ledger's directory list. adr-2609021016270132: the principles family is a declared record store with four typed keys, forward-only, read cold by statement and never by citation, with the inheritance check. adr-2609021016288378: in its three-surface form, because the single-section draft contradicted the design's two landings and adr-55's definition of the construal.
dcn-26090200000000112026-09-02 — adr-56's third rule is refined, not contradicted, by the source-and-tests ruling (maintainer): a control that admits an input it cannot examine may pass it only with a per-item unscanned mark in its attestation, so the second rule (an attestation never says more than the examination) carries what the third rule carried; refusal stays the rule for an input the control claims to have examined and could not. Invariant 16 amended to say so. Every ADR is now checked against the framework v4 and the companion v4: adr-58 is superseded by adr-2609021016286571, adr-2609021016272867 is corrected to the derived run, and none of adr-55, adr-57, adr-2609021016275803, adr-2609021016270132, adr-2609021016288378 or adr-2609021016286571 contradicts either document. The two-hundred-thousand-token target is a clarification the documents do not speak to, kept as such.
iss-2608290808193471Nothing ties a merged implementation to closing its spec, so twelve specs stayed open and twelve intents stayed planned after the code that realises them landed on main: abcd spec close is the verb that advances the intent planned to shipped, closes the spec open to closed, and emits the fidelity-audit receipt, but no gate, lint rule or CI step notices that a spec is still open while its acceptance criteria are demonstrably delivered. The consequence is not cosmetic: the changelog composer reads the shipped-intent and resolved-issue folders, so a release cut derived while the intents sit in planned announces the resolved issues and omits every intent the release actually delivers. Found after the itd-150..162 implementation merged with all fourteen issues resolved but all twelve specs left open. Wants a detector for the shape 'spec open, linked intent planned, and the spec's own scope files changed since the spec was written', which is the same reference-graph the dangling-supersedes ratchet already walks.
iss-2608290820473197An INCONCLUSIVE fidelity verdict is terminal, so an audit that could not decide anything is indistinguishable from one that passed. The ingest does not branch on the verdict value: it rolls the per-criterion verdicts into counts and replaces the parked OWED marker with INGESTED whatever they say, so a verdict of all-INCONCLUSIVE closes the receipt exactly as a verdict of all-MET does. The re-emit verb then refuses to reopen it, reporting already_ingested and leaving the Audit Notes untouched, which is correct for a decided audit and wrong for an undecided one. The consequence is that there is no way to ensure the re-run that an INCONCLUSIVE calls for. The only lever that produces a fresh receipt is editing the acceptance-criteria section, because the receipt digest is taken over that section alone, which conflates two unrelated acts: clarifying a promise, and retrying an audit that was merely under-fed. This is a loud-staging violation in the precise sense the principle names, since a stage that degraded presents as a completed one. The narrow fix is for the ingest to branch: an INCONCLUSIVE leaves the receipt OWED, or moves it to a distinct re-run state, so the outstanding work stays visible without minting a ledger issue for what is an input fault rather than a product defect.
iss-2608290822140563The fidelity audit runs after the merge, so its verdict arrives when the cheap remedies are already gone, and the code refuses any other ordering: the ingest rejects an intent that is not in the shipped bucket, and the emit fires from the ship move itself, so an intent cannot be audited against the candidate diff on a branch. The stated reason is sound as far as it goes, that a report-only review must never un-ship what has already shipped, but it answers a question that only arises because the audit was placed after the merge in the first place. Audited before the merge, a failing criterion has three cheap answers: fix the branch, revise the promise before making it, or decline to merge. Audited after, it has none, because there is no un-ship path and the code is on the trunk. The counter-argument is real and should not be waved away: a branch is not the tree that lands, since the merge queue lands merge commits and a semantic conflict with a concurrently merging change can alter the delivered reality after the verdict was formed, so the post-merge audit judges what is actually true while a pre-merge one judges a candidate. The shape that gets both is to gate on the pre-merge verdict and bind it to a content hash of the tree it judged, then check deterministically after the merge that the landed content still matches, reopening the receipt only on a mismatch, which costs one hash comparison rather than a second audit and reuses the content-addressing the transcript store already relies on. Whatever the ordering, the model's verdict must stay a proposal and a human acknowledgement must remain the gate, because a non-deterministic verdict that can block a merge on its own is a trust step this repository has not taken and would train people to route around the gate.
iss-2609012259586524The glossary carries fifteen product terms and none of the ledger's own vocabulary, so the widening reading reads against terms that do not name its object
iss-2609012259587904The assembler passes the shipped intents at the widening position, which the readings companion's widening object does not list
iss-2609020626118168Ruling owed: whether every rewrite of the construal must carry a reframe record, which refines adr-55 and reaches rewrites no reading occasioned
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.
itd-183The cold reading sees exactly what the assembler passes — positive inclusion, field projection, and a per-run manifest
itd-2609020625402518A reframe occasioned by a reading is recorded as a reframe, joined to what occasioned it, without carrying the construal it replaced
spc-61The cold-reading input assembler: positive inclusion at field granularity, a pathless bundle, and a hashed per-run manifest
spc-64The read-block eval falsifies the firewall
spc-2609020626048705The reframe record: `capture reframe` writes one `rfm-N` keyed on the committed fingerprints of the three frame surfaces before and after, joined to the reading item, disposition or surprise that occasioned it