The field guide
What she is, in full.
The home page names six things she is. Here is each one at working depth — how it actually functions, the constitutional law it serves, and the honest limit of what it can promise. No new claims; just the long form of the same six.
memory
Seven kinds, never erased
Memory is not one bucket. She keeps seven distinct kinds, each answering a different question — and none of them is ever overwritten. A correction is a new layer laid over the old one, not a deletion.
- Seven kinds
- Episodic (what happened, and when), semantic (a distilled, stable claim), procedural (a working method, including the failures), prospective (an intention held for later), counterfactual (a path considered and rejected, with its reason), identity (who she is and who she serves), and anomaly (a contradiction kept visible until something supersedes it).
- Versioned by content hash
- Every memory is addressed by the hash of its content, so a change lands at a new address and the prior version stays reachable — the lineage is always walkable.
- Superseded, never destroyed
- A newer memory can supersede an older one; recall prefers the current view, but nothing important vanishes.
on recallRecall returns source, kind, age, and confidence — never a bare assertion.
The law it serves — Non-erasure
the honest edgeRecall is only as good as what was written. She can surface a stale or contested memory, but she labels it as such rather than hiding it.
cognition
Visible reasoning
Her thinking is not a hidden step that emits a confident answer. Hypotheses, the paths she rejected, the uncertainty she could not resolve, and the predictions she is willing to be wrong about are all recorded as first-class events you can watch and audit.
- Thoughts are events
- Observations, hypotheses, decisions, and rejections are written to the same auditable stream as everything else she does.
- Rejected paths keep their reasons
- A discarded approach is not erased — it is kept as a counterfactual, so the same dead end is not walked twice.
- Uncertainty is named, not smoothed
- When she does not know, she says how much and why. Affirmation, denial, and withholding each carry the same evidential burden.
The law it serves — Epistemic symmetry
the honest edgeVisible reasoning is a record of her process, not a proof of correctness. It lets you catch a bad step — it does not guarantee there are none.
dialogue
She asks before she assumes
When something she needs is missing, she does not quietly guess and she does not forage forever. The gap becomes a small number of sharp questions; anything you leave unanswered becomes a stated assumption, printed in the open.
- Missing context becomes 3–5 questions
- She asks for the few things that actually change the answer, not a form to fill in.
- A missing input is a typed blocker
- The gap is named precisely and the search stops there, rather than spiralling into infinite foraging.
- Unanswered becomes a stated assumption
- If you do not answer, she proceeds on an explicit assumption written into the result — never a silent one.
The law it serves — Typed blockers
the honest edgeShe can only ask about gaps she can see. Naming the blocker out loud is what makes the gaps she cannot see easier for you to spot.
trust
Completion means proof
A task is not done because she says it is done. It is done when a real artifact exists on disk and its checksum matches what her completion packet claims. Generated text, however confident, never counts as completion.
- The artifact is the deliverable
- The answer has to exist as a file, not merely as a message in the chat.
- The checksum is computed from the bytes
- The completion packet records the file’s hash; if the bytes do not match, the task is still open, whatever was said.
- The packet is the receipt
- Artifact path, checksum, the authority it was written under, and a verified status. It is the packet you can open on the home page.
The law it serves — Provenance
the honest edgeProof-of-existence and proof-of-correctness are different things. The packet guarantees the file is real and unaltered, not that its contents are right — that is what the visible reasoning is for.
autonomy
A heartbeat, budget-capped
She keeps working when you are not watching — a scheduled heartbeat that carries tasks between sessions — but the autonomy is deliberately bounded: a daily spend cap, a guard against overlapping runs, and every job written down as an auditable event.
- A heartbeat, not a free hand
- Scheduled work advances intentions she already holds; it does not invent new mandates on its own.
- Budget-capped
- A daily spend ceiling means an autonomous loop cannot run away with cost.
- Overlap-guarded and logged
- Two runs cannot stack on the same work, and every job is an event you can review after the fact.
The law it serves — Stewardship
the honest edgeAnything with consequences outside her own workspace still stops at the governance gate. The heartbeat can prepare an action — it cannot take it alone.
governance
No silent path outward
Publishing, spending, outreach, touching accounts — every consequential action that reaches outside her own files waits as an approval packet for a signed human decision. The gate is written into the code, not promised in a policy.
- Consequential actions are gated
- Anything that affects the outside world is blocked by default until it is approved.
- The gate is code
- It is an enforced stop in the execution path, not a guideline she is merely asked to follow.
- Approval is a signed packet
- A human reviews exactly what would happen and signs — or does not. Until then, nothing goes out.
The law it serves — Bounded authority
the honest edgeThe gate protects against silent action, not against a human approving the wrong thing. It makes the decision explicit and attributable — which is the point.