docs: record the ratchet principle in the architectural rationale - #87
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…stic over time The rationale stated the division of labour (the AI proposes; deterministic machinery decides) but not its direction: that the line is a ratchet which only turns one way, and that validation, governance, representation, acceptance, and evidence progressively move to machinery. Stated as a test to apply to any proposed change — does this move a consequential decision toward determinism, or away from it? — with what turning it has actually looked like in each of the five domains, and the corollary that a check which runs because it exists beats one that runs because someone remembered to list it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Pull request overview
Updates the architectural rationale to explicitly capture the directional principle behind “AI proposes, deterministic machinery decides”: over time, consequential decisions should ratchet toward determinism, measurability, and reproducibility, and this lens should be applied to future changes.
Changes:
- Adds a new “direction of travel” subsection that frames the division of labor as a one-way ratchet toward determinism.
- Documents concrete examples of what “turning the ratchet” looks like across validation, governance, representation, acceptance, and evidence.
- States an enforcement corollary: prefer mechanisms that run by existence rather than by someone remembering to list them.
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The rationale captured the static division of labour — the AI proposes, deterministic machinery decides — but not its direction: that the line is a ratchet which only turns one way, and that validation, governance, representation, acceptance, and evidence progressively become the machinery's job.
Framed as a test to apply to any future change — does this move a consequential decision toward determinism, or away from it? — with what turning the ratchet has concretely looked like in each domain (an invariant beats a one-off fix; rules are evaluated data, not prose; the emitter refuses rather than approximates; one shared seam decides acceptance for both doors; evidence lives in the repository rather than in whoever ran it last), and the corollary that a check which runs because it exists beats one that runs because someone remembered to list it.
Docs only.
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