The 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 section

Typed links: refines the brief skeleton's 01-product/ chapter (a new section, not a rework of an existing one). Receives the committed framing products of itd-142; only committed products land here — framing traces stay local per adr-50, as refined by adr-55: the construal as it presently stands is committed record and readable by automated readers (the cold reading included); its history is not.

Press Release

A brief now says why the why holds. The product chapter gains a framing section — the macro-why home: the frame the project reasons inside, stated where a reader can find it instead of reconstructed from scattered scope and context notes. It is a first-class brief section: the brief↔lifeboat mapping carries a matching row, disembark probe measures it against real repositories like any other section, and the brief-creation interview's committed framing products land in it with the same confirmation discipline as everything else in the brief.

Why This Matters

The brief records what the project is and what constrains it, but the frame those answers were formed inside has no home: today it leaks into 02-context.md and 04-scope.md as asides, or stays in humans' heads. A named framing section makes the macro-why a maintained artefact — and gives the itd-142 interview a committed destination, so elicited framing lands in the record rather than in a transcript that is discarded.

What's In Scope

• The new section under 01-product/ (position and filename fixed at the planning interview), with its reading guide in the chapter README.
• The matching row in the brief↔lifeboat mapping — a change to internal/core/lifeboat/mapping.go, whose generated table and round-trip tests hold 00-meta.md in agreement.
• The tier hypothesis for the new row (expected: blank at tier 0, partial at best from conventions, grounded only abcd-native — like product/personas, framing is a question for a human, not an extraction).
• This repository's own framing section, written as the first instance.
• The construal statement the section opens with: what the situation is treated as, in one or two sentences — the surface a widening reading reads against; where it describes an intention rather than a commitment it carries the not-yet-real marker.
• The not-yet-real marker's form (ratified 2026-08-30): a blockquote line holding exactly **Status: NOT YET REAL.**, a blank line, then the statement as the first paragraph — the file-level Status: LIVE convention carried to passage level. One exact token, reader-visible in the rendered prose, lintable later without new machinery.
• Ruled (facilitator, 2026-08-28; decision log): the construal is sited as a brief section — this section — and adr-50 is extended to distinguish construal from revision history, the extension filed as an ADR in Iteration 1 before the construal surface is built (it files first in the build sequence; adr-55 is that extension). Ground: dropping the Step 2 reading would forfeit the position of greatest exposure; a glossary-only reading is a defensible fallback but must be stated as a bound, never passed off as the full reading.
• Construal revision passes the prior construal to the local ledger side rather than retaining it in the section — the brief holds the present (adr-5) and version control serves history; no in-section version trail.

What's Out of Scope

• The elicitation — itd-142 owns how framing is asked for; this intent owns where it lives.
• Framing traces — adr-50: only committed products enter the section.
• Glossary curation — the glossary README already names committed terms as the framing's machine-visible fingerprint; no new machinery here.

Acceptance Criteria

BDD format, per the itd-1 discipline. Initial set; refined at planning.

• Given the brief skeleton, when the section ships, then 01-product/ contains the framing section, the chapter README indexes it, and 00-meta.md's generated mapping table carries its row — with the round-trip test proving code and document agree.
• Given a repository probed by disembark probe, when coverage is reported, then the framing section is measured and reported with the same three-valued status as every other section.
• Given an itd-142 interview that commits framing products, when they land, then they land in this section with confirmation provenance, and nothing uncommitted lands at all.
• Given the framing section, when it is read, then it opens with a one-or-two-sentence construal statement, and any passage describing an intention rather than a commitment carries the not-yet-real marker.
• Given a construal revision, when the section is rewritten, then the prior construal exists on the local ledger side and not in the brief.
• Given the framing section, when it is projected, then the construal statement and its load-bearing vocabulary are machine-extractable — fixed section heading, statement-first layout, the exact marker token — so the framing vocabulary can be pulled from the brief retrospectively (facilitator review requirement, 2026-08-28).

SOTA

Surveyed on 2026-10-23; sources, evidence tiers and the local fit risks are in the elicitation interviews SOTA note.

• Design-document convention keeps interpretation out of "context", which must be "entirely focused on objective background facts", and puts committed scope in goals and non-goals (Ubl, Design Docs at Google); a construal is interpretive, so it belongs beside goals, not in the context chapter.
• The problem is a single story ("a single specific story that shows why the status quo doesn't work", Shape Up ch. 6); the PR/FAQ writes it from the customer's point of view. Neither template marks built against intended.
• The one practitioner artefact with a structural line between exploring and committed is the opportunity solution tree (Torres): the outcome "sets the scope for discovery" and a backlog entry "is making a bet".
• Living-spec tools split the two by file, not by marker: OpenSpec keeps specs as "how your system currently behaves" and changes in separate folders merged on archive; Spec Kit bans speculation from a spec and confines open points to [NEEDS CLARIFICATION: …]. RFC 2119 words cannot carry "intended, not built": they are for interoperation, used "sparingly".
• The traceability pass of 2026-10-04 already recommends status in links, not prose; the ratified **Status: NOT YET REAL.** marker puts status in prose. The research disagrees with the ruling on that one point; the marker stands, recorded as the first instance of that status, to be superseded by section identifiers and realises links when that work lands.
• A frame is a lens, not a solution (Dorst's frame creation, publisher description only; primary texts paywalled).

Path 2: the native section shaped to the design-doc convention, construal beside goals, the ratified marker kept, and a stable section identifier given at birth as the seam to link-carried status. No Go dependency.

The independent fit-challenge runs at plan time.

Open Questions

• Section position and filename within 01-product/ (the chapter is numbered; inserting versus appending changes existing links).
• Whether the tier hypothesis for framing matches personas (blank below abcd-native) once probed against the corpus — where they disagree, the mapping table loses.
• (SOTA 2026-10-23) Whether the framing section sits with the product chapter's goals and scope or opens the chapter; the design-doc convention argues against it reading as context.
• (SOTA 2026-10-23) Whether the section carries a stable identifier from its first instance, so the not-yet-real marker can later be replaced by links without a rewrite.

Evidence 2026-10-04 (a downstream lab)

Recorded for the product thinker; nothing here decides the question. A downstream private project's brief-authoring lab found that the present-tense-only convention makes a target-design brief read as a working product: 99 present-tense product claims against 9 "staged" markers. Its owner called this the biggest issue they face with abcd, and holds that the brief is the target design the product thinker owns. A framing chapter is one place a brief could say which of the two it is; the lab named this intent with itd-142 and itd-61.

Hypothesis 2026-10-04 (the brief's tense)

Recorded from the product thinker, 2026-10-04, answering how a brief describes what is not built yet, verbatim: "this is a big open question I'm currently testing on another repo. My current hypothesis: The brief is the main 'target design' document for the PT; while written in present tense, it's a vision of what the PT assumes the final product will look like. That way, the PT can 'think' about the product in a familiar way, while abcd helps them -- via the TF -- to make it a reality (step-by-step). We need SOTA research to ensure abcd will do that in a deterministic way, e.g. by listing implemented intents and/or plumbing implementations to each brief section; if the PT then changes the brief, abcd must assess whether a new intent/issue is required (and record it) or whether an existing intent (already filed, planned, and/or build) contradicts that change, in which case the PT is owed a design decision. Makes sense?" Recorded as a working hypothesis under test, not a ruling; a state-of-the-art pass on deterministic brief-to-record traceability was started the same day.

Audit Notes

Empty. Populated by intent-auditor when intent moves to shipped/.