Operating Doctrine
Revision v1.0.0 FROZEN (2026-10-03) // STATUS: BOOTSTRAP
"Decision rules for research, architecture, infrastructure, and governance. When principles conflict with execution pressure, the Doctrine decides."
The Eight Constitutional Decision Gates
Reversibility & Blast-Radius Ceiling
No initiative may launch without a pre-registered blast radius and automated rollback verification. If recovery requires manual ad-hoc intervention, Gate 1 is violated.
Epistemic Integrity vs. Goodhart/Campbell
Hypotheses and kill conditions must be timestamped before data collection. Evaluation harnesses must use held-out test sets to prevent metric gaming.
Mandatory External Portability
Every external dependency above the criticality threshold must maintain an executable exit drill. Zero vendor entrapment tolerated.
Architectural Shift Justification
Distributed systems, framework switches, or schema rewrites must produce measurable empirical advantage over simpler alternatives.
Control Independence in Autonomous Systems
Autonomous self-modifying loops must possess an isolated out-of-band termination path held by two independent reachable individuals.
Infrastructure Promotion
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. Premature complexity is an institutional defect.
Kill Condition Precision
An initiative without a quantitative or decisive kill condition is not an experiment; it is an endless project. Falsification criteria must be unyielding.
Capability Ledger Verification
Artifacts must demonstrate reuse across distinct projects and measurably raise the baseline starting floor for subsequent teams.