Engineering Boundaries
Each check should say what it establishes and what remains unknown. These are requirements to enforce and test, not blanket claims about deployed behavior.
Report what the evidence establishes
A heuristic, a feasible solution, a proven optimum within a formal model, searched evidence, and an independently checked proof make different claims. Keep those distinctions visible. The evidence requirement determines which kind is sufficient for this decision.
Two delivery plans might both meet the same capacity, budget, and service constraints. Either can be acceptable without being the same plan. Requiring a proven optimum is a separate business requirement, not something the solver or a confident model answer gets to assume.
A permitted exception may let an authorized person act with remaining uncertainty. That changes permission to act, not what the evidence proves. Some constraints cannot be waived by the current actor.
Selection is not yet a promise
A declared rule, another formation, or a person can select among acceptable results. Selection may be delegated under an explicit mandate. A selected recommendation does not grant itself the authority to bind the organization.
A commitment is an authorized undertaking tied to a specific version of a Business Truth. Others may make decisions in reliance on it. If selection and commitment happen together, the binding mandate must already exist.
The canonical commitment preserves the undertaking, its version, authority, constraints, evidence, and relevant uncertainty across explanations for different roles. A clearer explanation must not quietly become a different promise.
Keep the proposal that looked good until it did not
Shared context preserves the record of proposals, admitted facts, evidence, and decisions. Promotion admits a record under the context contract; it is not a universal proof of a statement about the world.
When new evidence changes an assessment, append the rejection, correction, or supersession and its reasons. Keep the original and what it influenced. A solver can use a filtered view without deleting excluded candidates from history.
A better idea does not release an existing commitment. Changes to an undertaking must be explicit because others may already have relied on it.
Reproducibility has a defined boundary
Converge is the low-level contract close to the mathematics: kernel, shared context, facts, authority boundaries, and promotions. Determinism and confluence claims require the complete inputs, versions, transformations, policy, and execution assumptions to be specified and satisfied.
A deterministic gate alone does not make every loop deterministic. The same human intent followed by fresh LLM calls need not produce identical proposals or results. Replaying recorded contributions is different from asking models to reason again.
Ferrox, Arbiter, Prism, and Soter contribute different forms of calculation, authorization, or assurance. Their claims must retain their own scope. Prediction and learned models can inform a proposal without establishing proof or granting authority.