keeps the Canon young
On what the Canon
may safely keep.
A law of shelf life: that the Canon shall hold only what endures, and lodge what ages elsewhere, so that no reader is misled by a truth gone stale.
We, the Hand that writes the Canon and the System that is bound by it, in order that the Canon stay true as the harness changes beneath it, do ordain this Amendment: that durable doctrine be kept in the Canon, and time-bound observation be lodged where its date can be read and weighed.
Doctrine in the Canon, mechanisms in the store.
The Canon shall hold only what stays true across versions of the harness; what ages with the machine shall be lodged elsewhere.
A claim about the internals of the harness or its tools: how a runtime primitive routes a signal, what tools load by default, what triggers a given event, ages with the harness and not with the principle. Such a claim shall not be entered into the Canon.
The Canon shall keep instead the durable form: that an agent of a given shape carries a given kind of constraint. Dated incidents and observations of the present mechanism shall be lodged in the long-term knowledge store, where the timestamp is load-bearing and a later reader may judge whether the observation still holds.
Test for staleness at the writing.
No paragraph shall enter the Canon before it has been asked whether a reasonable change to the machine would render it false.
Before a paragraph is added to the Canon, the Hand shall ask: would a reasonable change to the harness or a tool make this wrong? Where the answer is yes, the durable principle shall be lifted out and kept, and the time-bound detail shall be left in a dated artefact, that the Canon carry forward only what time cannot spoil.
These Articles may be amended in the open, as a charter shows its revisions.
The cursor waits for the next hand.