122-Collections set the unquoted-source limit

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

Status: accepted Date: 2026-10-23 Amends: 082-Grounding is bounded on the artifact by unquoted sources, decision 2

Context

ADR 082 bounds an artifact at five tracked sources cited without a verified verbatim quotation, so that its grounding review fits one pass. It enforced the bound as a validator type rule registered for three type paths: types/note.md, notes/types/structured-claim.md and articles/types/article.md.

What the bound protects is a collection's review standard, not a property of a kind of artifact. A type list follows that standard only by accident:

  • An artifact in kb/notes/ escaped the bound by using another type. All 26 definitions and both theory proposals were unchecked.
  • An artifact held to no grounding review was bound because it used the note type: 29 reference pages, 14 agentic-systems pages and 13 workshop notes.
  • A type relocation silently drops the rule unless someone remembers its registration. Renaming kb/notes/ to kb/theory/ would have done so for structured-claim.

Applying the bound to every artifact is also wrong. It would newly fail three source ingests, which link other ingests as related reading, and four plain-text reports and workshop files. Nobody grounding-reviews either kind.

Decision

  1. The collection contract declares the bound. The collection-contract type gains an optional integer field, unquoted-source-limit. Where a contract sets it, commonplace-validate applies the ADR 082 count to every artifact in the collection, whatever its type, plain text included, and fails an artifact over the limit. The nearest contract governs. A collection whose contract omits the field is not bound.
  2. Notes and Articles set it at five. Five remains ADR 082's convention, not a measured capacity. Each contract states its authoring conventions for the bound in its own prose, as before.
  3. The type registrations are removed. No type path selects the rule. ADR 082's counting rules are unchanged: which sources count, the (snapshot required) marker and the ## Quotes confinement.

The operativity path: commonplace-validate reads the field from the governing contract's frontmatter on every validation run and fails over-limit artifacts. The pinned-artifact adapter reads the same field from the contract snapshot it already requires. Authors read the field and its prose convention in the contract before writing.

Considered alternatives

Keep the exact type-path registrations and update them when types move. The hardwired-collections workshop's Gate E had adopted this. It lost because the registrations select the wrong population today, as Context shows, not only because they are fragile.

The type spec declares the bound, for example grounding-bound: true read from the resolved spec. This follows ADR 084 and survives type moves. But every type a collection uses must opt in separately: note, definition, structured-claim, theory proposal, article. A note-typed scratch file in kb/work/ would stay bound. The bound concerns how a collection is reviewed, which ADR 084 leaves to the collection contract.

Inherit through schema composition: bind any type whose schema extends the note schema. It needs no field, but it ties a review-economy rule to structural inheritance, which is implicit and surprising to an author.

Apply it to every artifact, or wherever the grounding gate applies. The gate has no type requirement, so the two are the same. Both lost to the seven new failures in ingests and text reports named in Context.

A boolean field with the number in code. Rejected. An integer lets a consuming KB choose its own bound per collection without a code change.

Free choices resolved: the operator chose Notes and Articles. Reference, Agentic Systems and the workshop layer stay unbound. The frozen Agent Memory Systems reviews stay unbound too.

Consequences

In kb/notes/, definitions and theory proposals are now checked; none is over the limit. The rename to kb/theory/ carries the bound with the contract and needs no validator change. A consuming KB enables the bound per collection by editing its contract, not code.

The note-typed pages outside Notes and Articles lose the check. None was over the limit when the check was removed, and their collections never promised a one-pass grounding review. A collection that adopts such a review should set the field when it adopts it.

Where the decision stops applying: it moves the bound's applicability, not its counting rules or its value. A nested collection inside a bound collection is governed by its own contract and is unbound unless that contract sets the field. The limit covers tracked ingests under kb/sources/ only, as ADR 082 does.

Relevant Notes: