100 — Check required route fields at member acceptance

Type: reference/types/adr.md · Status: accepted

Status: accepted Date: 2026-10-02

Context

The shared analysis contract requires seven answers for every route, regardless of which analyst declares it. Unstructured paragraphs can omit an answer while passing deterministic validation. Detecting an omission only during semantic verification spends a reconciliation round on a mechanical defect.

Decision

Require one unindented bullet with an exact label and a non-empty same-line answer for immediate return, later read-back, delegated visibility, selection predicate, invalidation or expiry, activation or effect, and evidence limits. An inapplicable or uninspected answer uses the corresponding exact value, an em dash, and a non-empty reason. The shared record contract owns the authoring syntax.

Check each route declaration under Shared records in every analyst member, including all analyst prefixes. Another record, an annotation, a source quotation or a fenced excerpt cannot satisfy the declaration's fields. Supporting prose and evidence remain free text.

Apply the rule through local member validation, set validation and publication. The existing worker refusal and amendment path repairs missing fields before reconciliation. Keep semantic verification responsible for adequacy and source support. Add no independent adequacy assay.

Retire obsolete live analysis sets and their generated reviews rather than reformatting or reanalysing them. Historical archives and completed local run states remain evidence of their original methods; they do not receive a compatibility path through current publication.

Considered alternatives

Leave presence to model verification. This permits flexible prose but makes an unconditional, mechanically decidable omission consume analytical review. The exact labels trade limited format flexibility for earlier refusal.

Add structured tables or YAML records. These would change the representation read by downstream consumers without a demonstrated need beyond presence checking. Labelled bullets preserve Markdown records and stable identifiers.

Add an adequacy assay as well. The existing semantic judge already checks meaning and evidence. Another assay adds cost and variance without an established independent benefit. This narrows the earlier operator selection of combined presence and adequacy checks to presence plus existing verification.

Migrate old retained analyses. Reformatting complete answers would require repinning evidence, while missing answers would require new inspection. The operator judged these old sets insufficiently useful for current comparisons to justify that work. They are retired rather than made to appear newly valid.

Component fixity, separate status vocabularies and conditional theory fields remain outside the new check. Their existing substantive requirements remain.

Consequences

Analyst workers receive the syntax through their declared shared-contract input. Member validators consume the exact labels as binding shape checks; set validation and publication reject a member with an omission. The workflow delivers those diagnostics through its existing bounded amendment retry. Reconciliation, semantic judges, synthesis and comparison readers continue to consume Markdown findings and stable IDs. A test compares the validator's label vocabulary with the delivered contract.

The rule establishes presence, uniqueness and reason syntax. It does not establish truth, complete source coverage, valid conditional applicability or behavioral benefit. Those remain analytical judgments. This decision adopts the presence-check portion of Required route fields as labelled record lines; its old-record migration and separate adequacy assay are declined.