01 — The lexicon
Summary
The scoped vocabulary in the sibling graphs site's format: each term defined by its edges rather than its label, sitting inside one sequence — reality, twin, facts, finding, risks, decisions — that is a constraint rather than a preference. Grant and mandate are both artefacts (identifier, hash, signature, never a keypair); the delta between them is computed and never stored, in three directions with three audiences: excess for security, shortfall for operations, blind spots for whoever is deciding whether to trust the self-assessment. The tier of a control is the one test that decides whether a control is real: it bounds a grant only when enforced by something the grant does not include, and a control that evaluates outside the agent's loop is a boundary even when it is configuration for the platform.
Key concepts
- The ordering rule — reality → twin → facts → finding → risks → decisions, in that order
- Excess and shortfall — grant − mandate, and mandate − grant — different audiences, different remedies
- The three tiers — boundary, setting, expectation — most controls people rely on are settings that read like boundaries
Key ideas
- A node carries no inherent meaning; what a term is emerges from where it sits in the chain.
- A mandate stored as prohibitions widens silently; the allow-list is stored, prohibitions are a dated rendering.
- History is a time axis on the grant: memory on turns the tree into a union over the past.