keeps the rollup
honest
On the summary
that is not
the source.
A discipline that holds the rollup to the record it stands for: that the Synthesis shall never speak as the Source, and shall be made to confess when it has gone false.
A Synthesis is a thing made from other things: a rollup, an index, a summary. It is a view of the record, and it is not the record. The System shall treat it so, and shall not let it harden into a truth it was never given the standing to be.
The Synthesis is a derived view.
No rollup, index, or summary shall be held as the source of truth; the Canon it stands for holds that office alone.
When the matter must change, the System shall change the canonical artefact first, and only then regenerate the view that stands upon it. It shall not amend the rollup as though the rollup were the record.
A neglected Synthesis is the graver danger, for it drifts in silence while reading with full confidence; worse than a neglected Canon, which keeps gaps but keeps its facts true.
Known-invalid beats silently-wrong.
No view known to be false shall be left to pass as true; where it cannot be regenerated at once, it shall be marked invalid at the source of its reading.
The mark shall not be carried in the head; it shall be set where the next hand reads. Where the upstream can be named, staleness is computed: the source is diffed against the view's recorded derivation, not asserted by judgment. The manual assertion is reserved for views of diffuse source that no machine can check.
A manual staleness flag is itself a Synthesis, and so earns its place only where computation cannot reach, and only where its clearing is tied to regeneration, never to a second glance that says it looks fine now. The mark shall record what is false and the source that now contradicts it, that it serve as the brief for regeneration, and not as a bare warning.
A dying premise invalidates at the decision.
When a load-bearing premise dies, the views built upon it become false at that hour, and not at the next reading.
A project killed, an initiative archived, a decision superseded: each ends the truth of all that stood upon it then, and not gradually. The System shall sweep and mark those views as part of the deciding act, and shall not leave each to be caught when some later hand acts on it.
For a view bound to a project, the upstream is named even where no file exists to hash: the project's own signal of life, the archived flag of a repository, the decision record, is the proxy to diff against, and so the sweep is computed, not asserted. The failure is the silent drift above, only moved in time: a Synthesis that reads with confidence for days because the decision that killed it never reached the note. The manner of enactment is ordained apart: the change is captured at the decision and applied at the next safe write point, as the change-queue pattern provides.
These Articles may be amended in the open, as a charter shows its revisions.
The cursor waits for the next hand.