Case packet

Neutral case identifier: case-ad48aaedc0e182

The possible directed relationship from Artifact A to Artifact B is under review.

Artifact A

First principles are inherited constraints, not design choices

A companion note shows which rules a universal framework cannot keep as universals: first-order content taxonomies [demote to guarded defaults] because they are not universal — the next kind of KB breaks them. This note is the other half: the rules that genuinely constrain the design space and therefore cannot demote.

The membership test: a rule is a first principle iff it arrives in the constraint packet of one of the framework's boundary commitments — the consumer it serves, the substrate it is built on, the domain it commits to (knowledge), or the machinery it has built. The commitments themselves are chosen, sometimes for features unrelated to the constraints they bring — files picked for ubiquity and tooling, not for how placement behaves. But every such choice is a packet deal: whichever substrate is chosen, its limitations come along whole, and the framework cannot cherry-pick the features it likes out of the bundle. What is unchoosable is not the boundary but the unbundling — and that is the sense in which a first principle is inherited: it comes with a commitment, never on its own terms.

Nor does composition escape a packet: a framework can combine parts built on different substrates, but each part still answers to its own substrate's limitations — artifacts held in files obey the file packet even when acceptance state lives in a database next door. Machinery coherence fits the same shape, just later: building machinery of a given kind is the choice, and its coherence rules are the packet. These four are the boundary commitments currently visible; the list is open, like the list of principles itself.

The two halves are therefore not symmetric. Design choices are positions within the design space: a rival can be swapped in while every boundary commitment stays, so a framework aiming at universality can offer several and let a collection pick — they demote to guarded defaults. First principles are boundaries of the design space: there is no rival position to demote to, and dropping one means re-choosing a boundary commitment and taking a different packet whole — not reconfiguration but a different framework.

The principles that currently pass the test

Each is named with the boundary it inherits from. The list is what passes today, not a closed set.

  1. Bounded context / context economy — inherited from the consumer's architecture. The reader attends to one finite window in which everything competes (since [context efficiency is the central design concern in agent systems]), and the binding pressure is silent degradation before any hard limit (since [agent context is constrained by soft degradation, not hard token limits]). Specific length norms are local strategies serving this economy; the economy itself cannot be opted out of while the consumer is an LLM.

  2. Composability / co-loading — inherited from how the consumer ingests artifacts: files load as whole units into one shared window, so an artifact's usefulness is decided by what it does when co-present with others (see [short composable notes maximize combinatorial discovery]). The inherited form is weak — every artifact must stay usable when loaded alone, without dragging in unrelated claims. The stronger "citable as a bare premise" rule is a theoretical-register design choice layered on top, not the principle.

  3. Substrate asymmetry — inherited from the file substrate. Directory placement is total (every file has exactly one location, no opt-out) while frontmatter classification is partial and opt-in, so location contracts and type contracts encode different guarantees and cannot substitute for each other (because [directory placement is total, frontmatter classification is partial]). On files this asymmetry is not negotiable.

  4. Answerability — inherited from the domain commitment to knowledge. Every artifact must answer to something outside itself and can therefore be wrong or stale; a collection that cannot state what its artifacts answer to and what makes one stale is not holding knowledge (see [the complement note's scope test], which states the answerability property; the [knowledge-artifact] definition supplies the artifact class this commitment quantifies over). Which relation an artifact bears — to the world, a system, an outcome, a source — is local; having one is not.

  5. Declaration obligation — inherited from machinery coherence. Every writable collection must carry a loadable contract, because the machinery routes and validates by reading that contract; a collection without one is an operational defect regardless of content. The complement note treats this as the surviving second-order universal (its shipped instance is ADR 017's COLLECTION.md).

  6. Admission discipline — inherited from machinery coherence. Once taxonomies are opened into extensible sets, some admission brake is required: without one, the open sets proliferate until no convention is shared — which is the other way to stop being a framework. As with composability, the inherited form is weak — an admission discipline must exist — while the specific worked-case guard (entries admitted only after surviving use in a real collection, never from anticipation) is the discipline this framework chose, layered on top. The complement note identifies that guard as the load-bearing piece that lets closed taxonomies safely open.

  7. Derived-copy rule — inherited from machinery coherence. A copy of information recomputable from a ground-truth source must be machine-checked against that source or not exist; a hand-maintained-and-trusted copy is a trap (because [a derived copy of recomputable truth must be checked or absent]). Any framework that caches recomputable values inherits this, since a silently stale trusted cache corrupts the consumers that trust it.

Contrast: rules that look like principles but demote

The membership test earns its keep by excluding rules that feel foundational but are positions the framework chose and could re-choose. Each of these demotes to a guarded default per the complement note:

  • The three [registers] (theoretical / descriptive / prescriptive) — a proven bundle, but a new kind of KB can need a fourth; they demote to default text-contract profiles.
  • Link-label sets — extends, grounds, contradicts, and the rest are a collection-owned selection from a shared catalogue, not a universal vocabulary.
  • Type sets — open and collection-local; the framework fixes that types exist and are path-valued (machinery), not which types there are (choice).
  • Spending the directory tree on content-area rather than on kind — a routing decision a given KB makes, reversible without touching the framework.
  • Status / lifecycle enums — the existence of a lifecycle is machinery; the specific values, and whether status fuses structural state with first-person endorsement, are a choice sitting one level too high.

The tell in every case: you can name a rival that also works under the same boundary commitments. When no rival exists — because the only alternative is to change the consumer, substrate, or domain, or to break the machinery — the rule is inherited, and the list above collects the ones currently visible.

Caveats

The durable content is the test, not the enumeration: a later principle may be recognized as inherited, or one of these may turn out to be a disguised choice with an unnoticed rival, and neither outcome would touch the test itself. The test defines first-principle status rather than deciding it — the rival-hunt is how the test is applied, and application is fallible in both directions. And "inherited" is always relative to a framework's own boundary commitments: a framework that changed consumer or substrate would inherit a different set. So these are first principles of this framework, not of knowledge bases in general.

Relevant Notes:

Artifact B

Short composable notes maximize combinatorial discovery

The library layer (kb/notes/) exists for co-loading. [Discovery] — seeing shared structure across particulars — requires co-presence: you can't find that three notes share unnamed structure if only one fits in context. Under [bounded context], the number of notes that fit determines the surface area for cross-cutting connections. Short, atomic notes maximize that surface area.

The gain is probabilistic, not mechanical — not every pair yields a discovery. What matters is breadth of independent perspectives. Notes from distant domains are more likely to reveal shared structure than additional notes within the same topic. The library should be optimized for this: many small, independently authored claims that can be loaded together in varied combinations.

[Resolution-switching] complements this. Claim titles and descriptions give broad surface-level pairing without loading full bodies; full notes are loaded selectively where depth is needed. Short notes make both modes cheaper.

Prior work

Atomic, composable units are a recurring design principle:

  • Zettelkasten (Luhmann) — one idea per note, connections between notes. "One claim, one note" is Luhmann's atomicity principle. The most direct ancestor.
  • Modular design (Parnas, 1972) — modules hide design decisions and expose interfaces. The Unix philosophy ("do one thing well, compose through pipes") is the same principle applied to programs.
  • Faceted classification (Ranganathan, 1933) — describe items along independent combinable facets rather than a single hierarchy. Composable notes are facets.

What's specific to our context is the bounded-context motivation: atomicity here is driven by a hard token limit that makes co-loading capacity the scarce resource, not by filing convenience or code maintainability.

TODO: This survey is from the agent's training data, not systematic. Zettelkasten methodology in particular has extensive practitioner literature on atomicity trade-offs worth ingesting.

The design rule

One claim, one note. The title states the claim, the body supports it, the footer connects it. If a note has multiple ## sections making independent claims, that's a signal to decompose.

Longer synthesized views belong in workshops or are generated. Theory overviews, campaign understanding, multi-note summaries — these are consumers of library notes, not library notes themselves. They live in kb/work/ as workshop artifacts with lifecycles, or are generated (like indexes). When the purpose is served, the workshop artifact expires but the library notes remain available for recombination.

Evidence

The improvement log provides examples. Entries tagged ABSTRACTION and SYNTHESIS are discoveries made by co-loading notes and recognizing shared structure:

  • "shared unnamed structure: execution-boundary compression" — found across five notes from different theoretical angles
  • "two independent decompositions of agent memory from different traditions that together predict a two-axis taxonomy" — found by co-loading notes grounded in cognitive science alongside notes grounded in computer architecture

The structure emerged from the juxtaposition of independent perspectives. A single long note synthesizing all of memory theory would have contained the same information but wouldn't have surfaced the cross-cutting structure — it would have pre-committed to one narrative instead of leaving the connections available for discovery.

Tension with argument coherence

Some arguments genuinely need space — the reasoning from premises to conclusion loses force when atomized. [Evolving understanding needs holistic rewrite, not composition] — when a consumer needs the whole picture, reconciling into a single narrative beats composing fragments.

The resolution: coherent narratives are workshop artifacts, not library artifacts. The library stores premises and conclusions as separate composable notes. The workshop assembles them into narratives for a specific purpose. When the narrative expires, the atomic notes remain.

Relevant Notes:

Under-review context phrase

co-loading is why composability is inherited from how the consumer ingests artifacts