Intent, authority, evidence

01. Start with a contract

A specification records intended behavior and its limits before implementation. In spec-spine, authored markdown and typed relationships provide the inputs to a compiled authority record. Ownership is declared over concrete units rather than inferred from a broad product description.

This distinction makes a proposal reviewable. A draft is still a proposal, and approval belongs to its owner. Tools can validate structure and consistency; a green check does not supply the owner decision.

02. Make authority inspectable

An authority graph can answer which specifications claim affected territory and how they relate. Coupling checks tie changes to that declared territory. The guarantee is bounded by what is declared and what the gate checks. It is not operating-system isolation or proof that parallel tasks share no external resources.

Each public repository remains its own specification authority. The website exports a reading payload through supported producer commands and links back to exact source revisions. It does not replace the source graph or judge implementation acceptance.

03. Keep local work explicit

Statecraft CLI describes a local environment for governed work. Project registration, read-only qualification, arming and execution posture are separate acts. Keeping those acts distinct avoids treating visibility in a project list as permission to execute.

Rahi provides a Rust chassis for governed applications, and Aicortex describes persistent memory for AI clients built on that chassis. A public codebase or a declared implementation does not establish a hosted service. The catalog therefore preserves declarations without inventing deployment status.

04. Evidence supports a bounded conclusion

Wire Witness treats captured provider traffic as evidence rather than authority. Rustev proposes decisions rather than granting them. The family also includes focused primitives for deterministic decisions and canonical serialization.

An append-only hash-linked record can establish internal consistency. Optional signing capabilities require a specific deployment and trust decision before issuer identity can be claimed. A verifier result, an approved specification and a deployed qualification should remain distinct in every public explanation.

05. Read the record with its limits

The public catalog shows lifecycle, implementation, summary, relationships, claimed units, headings and frozen anchors with immutable source provenance. Verification and deployment qualification remain unknown in this metadata export. That is a visible limitation rather than a missing badge to infer.

The current released producer does not export selected full sections. Follow the pinned markdown link for the complete specification. Future richer content or private-platform summaries need their own supported producer and publication contracts.

Public source references

References use the catalog snapshot observed on October 3, 2026. This is a current introduction, not a revision of the archived paper under its historical date.

1. statecrafting/action-gate README ↗6cfa81efb0426d2c4242e2919b58180ec3b384ea
2. statecrafting/aicortex README ↗e05a5a9c3a7724f2c491b24b8e1dc896518b741a
3. statecrafting/attest-ledger README ↗a6b3eac8aa9ae2d9f2329c687f818d10c82cc565
4. statecrafting/canonical-keysort-json README ↗920eb173da928b70cdc96c66d98cd85ac5dfd91d
5. statecrafting/rahi README ↗73e937cce7f9d5c25db0939801456b8c94b2359e
6. statecrafting/rustev README ↗1c713a61033279ce9b81d11d683bdf551f7a3769
7. statecrafting/spec-spine README ↗943504d6b82a9a6b40f7f3f82f39f89255aaa0d9
8. statecrafting/statecraft-cli README ↗0748fc721a5e51baff7c1d137be6e8756f7b9088
9. statecrafting/wire-witness README ↗9e8c647676f1898643c7cd2c301f6bb339db1bd5