pki.sgit.ai / documents / the-schemas-and-the-clocks

The Schemas, The Clocks, And A Warranty Is A Fact With A Maximum Age

TypeStrategy brief — memo 10, the last of the series Versionv0.33.81 Date31 August 2026 AuthorDinis Cruz (project lead) and collaborators LicenceCC BY 4.0 Sourceraw markdown · view on GitHub

Summary

Two memos in one — the project lead says so partway through and keeps recording. First the interfaces: the APIs and schemas the ecosystem needs, cover that holds only while stated preconditions hold, and real-time checks that matter more as the money rises. Then time: expiry, dynamic creation, activation, policies bought for a small window or for a fixed number of uses within one, office-hours cover, and requirements that are themselves time-bounded. The best thing in it is the backup example, which yields a definition sharper than anything the pivot had: A WARRANTY IS A FACT PLUS A MAXIMUM AGE — and it fails three ways, false, stale, or unknown, with unknown on the same side as false. That is the exact opposite of the rating rule, deliberately: for a rating, assuming absence manufactures comfort; for cover, assuming presence manufactures liability. It also completes a climb the pivot had been making without noticing — go-live gate, then running-agent gate, now PER-ACTION gate — and adds a third clock beside the policy interval and twin freshness: the warranty's own check interval, without which a policy in force against a fresh twin with a stale warranty looks covered and is not. Two more: metering USES is sound where metering verifications is not (a verification is not a use), but a usage-boxed policy needs an in-line counter this project is not, so we define the counting schema and somebody else holds the counter; and the reframe that answers the memo's own question — an API is operated, a schema is implemented, so the policy lifecycle ships as documents and appends, and the answer to 'what APIs do we need' is mostly none that we build.

Key concepts

Key ideas

On this site

Adds insurance doctrine 10, completing the series at ten, and generates insurance/llms.txt from the manifest. Proposes GM-D76 (a warranty is a fact plus a maximum age), GM-D77 (the third clock), GM-D78 (metering uses needs an in-line counter), GM-D79 (schemas not APIs) and GM-D80 (a recurring window states its timezone).

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📄 Original document · v0.33.81 · 31 August 2026 · rendered from the raw markdown (the source of truth)