enforced in depth
Three courses of one wall,
each catching what the last cannot.
A covenant that a derived view's freshness shall be held not by one guard but by three, declared, computed, and gated, so that what slips the layer below is caught by the layer above.
We, the Hand that authors the law and the System that is bound by it, in order that no derived view drift from its source while reading as though it had not, do ordain and establish this Amendment of the Canon.
The rule is set down in the Tenth: that a synthesis is a view, and never the source. Here we set down how that rule is held: not by a single guard, but by three layers raised one upon another, each watching for the drift the layer beneath it cannot see. They are not roads between which the System chooses; they are courses of one wall, and the System shall raise every course the artefact can bear.
Declared.
Every derived view shall carry, in its own hand, the account of what it rests upon.
Let the claim travel with the thing it describes. In its own frontmatter the artefact shall name what it derives from, when it was last verified against that source, and when it must be looked at again, so that a reader, or a later check, may read the ground beneath a view without departing from it.
This is the floor, and the floor is owed to every derived view. A synthesis that does not name its source cannot be told, by anyone, from one that has quietly gone false.
Computed.
A declaration may go stale in silence; a recomputed comparison may not.
Where the source of a view can be identified, the System shall not rest on the view's own word that it is fresh. It shall hash the source and set that hash against the derivation the view recorded, so that staleness is computed and not merely asserted. A declaration trusts the author's memory; a comparison trusts nothing, and is the stronger witness for it.
Reserve the bare assertion for those diffuse views whose source no machine can reach. Everywhere the source can be hashed, the comparison is owed.
Gated.
At the moments of consequence, a check shall run, and shall refuse to let its findings pass.
At the thresholds where a step cannot easily be undone, whether a merge, a deploy, or the close of a session, the System shall set a gate. The gate runs the check and, finding drift, halts; it does not log the fault and proceed. The layer beneath surfaces drift to whoever cares to look; this layer stays the hand of one who has not looked, at the one moment when looking matters most.
Let nothing irreversible pass a gate that has found drift, until the drift is resolved at its source.
This Amendment governs the enforcement of the Tenth, and shall not be read as the tiering set down in the canon's truth-derivation: that model asks which kind of verifier a fact can bear; this one orders the layers of enforcement laid upon a view's freshness. The two compose, for each layer here is itself a verifier of the mechanical, in-our-code kind.
These Articles may be amended in the open, as a charter shows its revisions.
The cursor waits for the next hand.