Creation

Start by writing the change another person should be able to verify. What should become possible, what happens today, and what evidence would distinguish a successful result? Creation takes that intended software change through a reviewed candidate to its authorized delivery owner, then returns evidence for future work. ADR 16 owns the lifecycle and handoffs. A recipient can begin when the intended change, present evidence, acceptance, and authority are clear enough to act without guessing.

This method can guide ordinary agent-assisted engineering under the actual host's permissions. The method itself introduces no CompositionAppApp, registered PatternWorkflowWorkflow, SpellStepStep catalogue or autonomous SDLC service. The narrower Creation investigation contract owns one public-source question, candidate and separate verdict; it does not implement this whole method. The current GraphStep MapStep Map is serial, and delegated execution supplies only an effect-free reference adapter. State of Work owns delivery.

Frame the delta before choosing the route

Separate what the user wants to achieve from ideas offered while discussing it. Brainstorming supplies possible questions, alternatives, and evidence leads. It grants no further authority to edit, spend, send, train, deploy, or publish. Preserve the actual authorization with the request.

Give the intended change an observable acceptance boundary. “Make development faster” still leaves the important decisions open: which delay matters, what is the baseline, and what improvement would count? Establish the present state through its canonical owners and the smallest relevant source and test slice. Then record the difference to achieve, the non-goals, and acceptance conditions. Those terms let the recipient judge a proposed solution by what it would actually change.

Owning documentation establishes intended truth before implementation under xDDDDocs-First DevelopmentDocs-First Development. Closure reconciles that truth with the actual result. A candidate, a verified change, and an authorized version-control effect remain distinct points in the passage.

A direction may require a bounded probe before it can be chosen. It may also end in an explicit non-decision. When a human choice remains necessary, bring the evidence, recommendation, consequences, and one answerable question. Later evidence can reopen the affected decision within the remaining budget and stopping conditions. Do not prolong work whose declared completion boundary has been met.

%%{init: {"flowchart": {"nodeSpacing": 12, "rankSpacing": 22, "padding": 8}}}%%
flowchart TD
    I[Intent] --> F[Desired vs current state]
    F --> Q1[Inquiry 1: direction]
    Q1 --> H{Settled under owner authority?}
    H -- human choice needed --> U[Evidence and one question]
    U -- decision --> H
    H -- missing evidence --> Q1
    H -- yes --> Q2[Inquiry 2: construction]
    Q2 --> T[Tests and task decomposition]
    T --> W[Bounded implementation]
    W --> V[Verification, review and needed evaluation]
    V -- repair within budget --> W
    V -- premise failed --> Q2
    V -- accepted --> D[Documentation closure]
    D --> S[Authorized VCS effect]
    S --> E[Completion and outcome evidence]
    classDef work fill:#102d46,stroke:#6faaff,color:#e3f0ff
    class I,F,Q1,H,U,Q2,T,W,V,D,S work

Reuse Inquiry at each uncertain boundary

Inquiry turns a consequential uncertainty into a decision someone can implement. Begin with a bounded question: what difference could change the next act? Finding that difference already exercises discernment. A separate judge supplies another position from which to examine the work. Judgment also belongs inside exploration, where a failed premise can redirect the search before a favored solution hardens.

1. Explore the question. Assemble serious alternatives, governing owner routes, observed facts distinguished from inference, source identities and revisions, omissions, and evidence that would defeat each proposal. A PostgreSQL-versus-SQLite comparison begins with actual requirements and existing persistence decisions. Naming alternatives does not reopen accepted architecture; its owner governs a change. Let findings create better questions, and let observations close answered ones with stated reopening conditions. Repeating an unchanged checklist establishes no coverage.

2. Judge coverage and sufficiency independently. Supply the question, acceptance, sources, and search scope. Where practical, initially withhold the favored conclusion; record later exposures and conflicts. The judge returns requirements covered with cited evidence, omissions, decisive unknowns, the smallest useful probes, a stopping recommendation within remaining time, calls, and resources, and conditions for reopening. A bounded direct-source probe may settle a gap. The target is sufficient evidence for this decision. One pass may request a bounded extension or recommend non-decision; it starts no endless succession of judges judging judges. Unverified judge claims remain claims. Separate sessions or models can share a source blind spot: agreement cannot fill a missing decisive source. The receiving owner may accept residual uncertainty only where governing law permits it, and retains the right to refuse.

3. Bring consequential alternatives through Crucible. Establish common evidence, distinct declared Postures, and defeat conditions. Obtain independent first reports; their join preserves the strongest claims, citations, concessions, and defeat conditions. Advocates then receive the actual opposition for second-round rebuttal. A separate Lead synthesizes the surviving case and dissent. Agreement supplies no truth-by-vote. Two unrelated essays, or one model imagining both sides, do not establish reciprocal exchange. Crucible's bounded casting owns the full contract.

Every handoff must carry the distinction that could change the recipient's next act. “Use this design” can hide an unresolved recovery assumption. “Use it only if the recovery probe preserves the committed records” exposes the condition and gives the recipient something to examine.

When admitted measurement can settle a factual dispute, specify the proposition, exact subject and environment, observable result, acceptance rule, and effect limits before running the probe. A recovery experiment might ask whether the exact candidate restores the records required by its declared contract under the stated interruption. Preserve failures and inconclusive results. Further argument cannot replace an available decisive measurement. Ordinary repository tests remain governed by their project owners; repeatable capability evaluation belongs to Drift.

The human decision account should name the concrete choice, recommendation and reasons, strongest surviving objection, unresolved consequence, and what changes under another choice. Ask only for a still-required choice or authorization. Exact standing authorization persists; Inquiry adds no blanket approval at each station. Required live Gates retain their exact-effect rules, and a reserved operator choice remains unresolved until answered.

Settling direction gives construction a more specific question; repeat Inquiry at that scale where uncertainty warrants it. A database choice still leaves schema ownership, interface placement, changed callers, and the documentation owner to establish. Inspect those seams, compare implementation cuts, and settle acceptance before splitting the work. Accepted conclusions can carry settled mechanical details forward without another debate.

When the decision is settled, carry it into bounded work. When another attempt may be needed, first make the reason for continuing inspectable.

Turn support and measure into a next step

At a consequential choice, collect two separate, qualitative recommendations about the same question and artifact. Support identifies the opportunity worth developing or uncertainty worth investigating. Measure identifies the limits, burden of evidence, and reasons to stop or narrow that work. Each cites its observations and distinguishes inference from what remains unknown. Strong support and strong measure can coexist: a promising candidate may deserve a strictly bounded trial. These two pressures are not numbers to subtract into an automatic verdict.

Unobserved is not low value, failed, or safe. A new possibility may need an initial discovery allowance to obtain the evidence either recommendation lacks. The coordinator can allocate that bounded probe from the existing parent budget, naming the decision it could change and what other work it displaces. Discovery does not reset the budget or promise every branch a trial.

The actual campaign coordinator selects the next step within its admitted scope, or presents an unresolved owner decision. In a native workflow, that choice must follow the admitted score; these recommendations introduce no hidden allocator or new runtime edge. Make the choice inspectable by recording:

• the exact question and candidate or evidence revision, the selected next action, and the reason it follows from the support, measure, and outstanding uncertainty;
• the observation sought, responsible participant, and cost ceiling within the remaining parent budget, including review and required checks; and
• what would settle or stop the attempt, what could reopen the question, and where its result must return.

When the probe returns, compare the observation sought with what it actually established, including inconclusive results and resources used. That comparison can revise a recommendation, justify continued work, or close the branch. Required authority and deterministic gates remain binding throughout. Support and measure recur during exploration, construction, and review; they are not confined to one Chesed–Gevurah station.

This separates three questions that can otherwise blur together. In the Tree correspondence, Gevurah supplies the measuring concern and Hod the reflective review; their relations appear below.

A failed candidate can still reveal a useful probe or question. Credit the method only for the distinction its evidence supports, rather than rewarding every preceding step. Continuing needs an informative reason—a changed candidate or justified replication, for example—and room in the parent budget. Repeated failure alone earns neither endless retries nor automatic memory or training admission.

Make the inquiry policy explicit

An operator campaign can configure this procedure in its task packet today. Record the policy before dispatch so a reviewer can distinguish a deliberate exploratory allowance from an unbounded retry. The packet needs:

This is an inspectable operating packet, not a new TOML section or browser control. Native configuration later selects an exact registered policy under the configuration-to-casting contract. Its owner must define typed inputs, units, bounds, defaults, stale and missing evidence behavior, and admission-time pinning before exposing a setting. Arbitrary prompts and graph edges do not become configuration, and a changed preference cannot alter a running ScrollWorkflow VersionWorkflow Version.

The practical question is what evidence makes this next probe worth its cost? Support and measure inform that answer; they do not issue capability grants, override a failed gate, or tune OrchestratorStage ManagerStage Manager priority. Compare proposed policies on matched continuation Cases before admitting a new default. AltarControl PanelControl Panel can display these reasons only when their owner supplies them with the relevant question, attempt and evidence identity; an emotion meter drawn from model prose would invent a signal.

Hand off work that can return intact

Use the accepted delta to decide how to test the work and where to divide it. Identify tests for changed behavior, failure and recovery obligations, along with the repository gates that must pass. Tasks can separate where their owners, inputs, outputs, and acceptance separate. Resolve shared-file mutation or an unsettled interface before distributing writers; either creates a dependency the handoff must respect.

Every task receives an immutable handoff containing:

A recipient starts with the smallest sufficient context for that contract; the parent retains the wider purpose and judges the return. Scoped handoff owns the runtime design. In an operator campaign, record the platform's actual context and permission boundaries rather than inventing a LychD RunJob RecordJob Record or containment receipt. Changed task requirements produce a successor handoff with explicit lineage.

Prepare a compact view between stages when it helps the next recipient continue. Keep accepted and unresolved decisions separate, explain why each matters, and preserve dissent, defeat conditions, exact source references, and unfinished obligations. Full attributable artifacts remain under their owners. If an omission leaves the next decision unsafe or unsupported, restore the necessary bounded material or stop. Compaction cannot turn missing evidence into an accepted premise.

Hand a bounded task to a CLI runtime

At decomposition, execution roads distinguishes a native step from work needing a separate iterative coding runtime. Exploration, an adversarial report, construction, or verification can each use that road when their own handoff permits it. The CLI wrapper adapts the request, process/effect boundary, cancellation, and result. The reasoning task stays the same; the wrapper supplies its execution boundary. Delegated agents owns that job boundary.

The designed branch is:

exact input projection
  → required privacy/anonymization path and semantic-sufficiency check
  → admitted bounded CLI job
  → quarantined, validated return
  → authorized local rehydration, when a reversible Cut permits it
  → independent verification against the real task
  → join the candidate

The anonymization workflow describes the transformations and independent privacy and utility verification; Security owns admission of the exact exit. A local task needs its authorized projection, but does not automatically need anonymization or a remote call. A local CLI's child provider call still creates a remote disclosure boundary. If transformation loses the identifiers or relations needed to answer the question, narrow the task, choose an eligible local road, or return noncompletion.

Before launch, pin the baseline and allowed paths, permitted tools and effects, resource ceilings, cancellation and uncertain-outcome handling, expected outputs, and result identity. Returned claims stay attributed to the actual job; rehydration neither validates a patch nor authorizes its execution. The receiving owner admits verified candidate material before it joins the work. These are required boundaries for the proposed branch: current LychD runs only its effect-free reference adapter and does not deliver this CLI, anonymization, or remote-egress path.

Implement, verify, and settle

Run independent tasks concurrently only where the actual execution environment supports their isolation, ownership, cancellation, and joins. Current LychD GraphStep MapStep Map execution is serial. General runtime fan-out and composed reusable subgraphs are not implemented under Graph's parallel contract; drawing Inquiry as one box does not register a nested executable PatternWorkflowWorkflow.

Each task returns candidate changes, observed verification evidence, and remaining blockers. The parent checks that return against the exact handoff before integrating it. Focused tests and required repository gates are followed by independent review of behavior, owner boundaries, and failure paths. Refactor where findings justify it, then rerun the affected checks. A failed test or review may return work to implementation or reopen a construction inquiry, within the remaining budget.

Review also examines what earns another attempt. Rewarding passed-check counts, agreement, or tasks closed can improve a proxy while losing the intended behavior. Here Hod reviews whether the evidence supporting Netzach's persistence still tracks the acceptance target. A changed criterion needs its own revision and renewed affected comparisons; it cannot turn an earlier failure into a pass. Support, branch budgets, and stopping decisions remain inspectable under the parent budget. Drift's continuation comparison tests whether reviewing this policy helps.

Owning documentation establishes the intended truth before implementation under xDDDDocs-First DevelopmentDocs-First Development. At closure, reconcile it with the actual result, update routes and delivery claims made stale by the change, and preserve evidence gaps. Then perform only the VCS effect already authorized for this task: patch delivery, commit, branch publication, or merge have different consequences and scopes. Retain the resulting identity and observed outcome. Do not infer permission to publish from permission to prepare a change.

Evaluation within and across Creation

Evaluation can contribute evidence inside the SDLC: a candidate may need a Drift Trial before promotion, alongside its distinct tests and review. After an admitted effect, observations can support evaluation of its actual consequences. The manifested result—Malkhut in the Tree correspondence—does not grade itself.

A different question takes the Creation method as its subject: does this way of exploring, allocating effort, or responding to criticism improve outcomes across tasks? DriftEvaluatorEvaluator's continuation comparison addresses that question. DriftEvaluator owns evaluation evidence wherever the lifecycle needs it; the candidate, workflow, or effect owner retains its decision. Ouroboros connects supported findings to a later admitted change, with training as an optional, separately governed remedy.

Return to the question the evidence changes

Route a finding by what it changes, rather than automatically climbing to the top of the Tree. A late discovery can require an earlier kind of attention on a new, more specific object. The Tree names those recurring capacities; the table gives each name the work it must do.

Binah can therefore reopen Chokhmah before the current design has failed: a new distinction may make a materially better arrangement thinkable. Novelty alone does not require more search. State the decision it could change, a decisive question, the remaining budget, and the stopping condition. Preserve already sufficient conclusions when the new finding does not affect them.

Preserve an earlier result when new findings require a return: the return creates a later task attempt. Retain the old artifact and identify the dependent conclusions that need reconsideration. Before reusing unaffected evidence, check that its inputs, assumptions, and obligations still apply. The changed candidate needs renewed affected verification and every check required by its final owner; the old candidate's pass cannot silently certify it. Within LychD, the return must follow the admitted ScrollWorkflow VersionWorkflow Version, and a changed score needs a successor revision. Human campaign labels cannot invent an undeclared runtime edge.

The workflow may be cyclic while an unfolded history of invocation and station-attempt occurrences is acyclic: each later attempt has its own identity and refers to earlier evidence. This is a history view, not a claim that every declared workflow is a DAG. A terminal RunJob RecordJob Record stays terminal, and later repair begins a new forward InvocationJob RequestJob Request.

Outcomes leave attributed event and trace records: exact inputs and revisions, route and task identities, observed tests and effects, cost or timing where measured, decisions, failures, and unresolved uncertainty. Observations remain distinct from owning ledgers and checkpoint truth. These records may become inputs to proposed workflow evaluation and improvement or, after separate corpus admission, discernment training. Neither a successful task nor a repeated failure automatically changes a workflow or model. Ouroboros follows that return from experience to a separately judged and authorized successor.

Tree relations in practice

The Tree of Life names capacities whose relationships can shape the work. A task can cast those questions as bounded agent roles without allocating one permanent worker to every node.

The engineering sequence was developed on the whiteboard before its comparison with the Tree of Life. The Tree's relations within relations now suggest refinements to examine: criticism within exploration, constructive alternatives within critique, and evidence-responsive persistence within implementation. Preserve the existing Inquiry as a baseline. Compare one changed relation on matched Cases through workflow evaluation, holding the task set, available tools, and resource budget fixed. Measure decision quality, missed constraints, recovery, and human attention. A useful correspondence must improve the work beyond renaming its stations.

The practical interpretation is:

Tiferet is the coherent design; Yesod is the assembled candidate; Malkhut is the admitted result. These distinctions preserve ADR 16's chain: Creation Request → Candidate → Verification → Promotion Request → target-owner effect. Tests are evidence-producing probes throughout the passage, rather than Netzach's exclusive job.

Opening and structuring may begin independently in parallel when they share a sufficient input floor and the host supports isolation. Their first reports then join; a reply that uses another report must follow its receipt. Serial work can also preserve independent first reports by withholding the counterpart until both are written; later exposure is recorded, not forgotten when a worker changes roles. Chesed and Gevurah likewise begin with distinct Postures before reciprocal exposure. Synthesis waits for the required contributions, or records which missing contribution blocks settlement. Development can split across independent components; review always names the candidate revision it examined. Shared mutable work and changing interfaces create dependencies, even when the drawing places their questions side by side.

Each pole directs attention while preserving common intent, evidence, criteria, and authority. They need not disagree. Their joined decision is aligned when it answers the relevant concerns; unsupported agreement cannot close a decisive unknown. This choreography refines bounded Inquiry at both direction and construction scales. Settled mechanical work does not require every role or a new debate.

An aspect can return in another task

A sefirah names a recurring capacity; a task gives that capacity a particular question. Binah can structure the architectural alternatives, then the fields and invariants of a chosen interface, then a distinction exposed by review. These are different tasks exercising the same aspect. Chokhmah can reopen possibilities at any of those scales. A worker may exercise several aspects in one response, and several workers may contribute to one aspect.

These are explanatory campaign distinctions. A native Agent remains the typed cognitive step owned by ADR 20; a worker session is not that contract by analogy. “Task attempt” here also stays distinct from SpellweaverWorkflow EngineWorkflow Engine's schedule/trigger Occurrence. Da'at concerns knowing made effective through an exchange; its packet is a carrier, rather than a definition of knowing.

One small staffing arrangement makes the distinction visible:

This staffing arrangement can unfold over time; its participants need not all be active together. Joining their work expresses Yesod, while Malkhut requires the target owner's actual effect. Exposure still matters when roles change. B cannot become independent of a design B helped author merely by reviewing it later, and C's exposures and conflicts must remain visible too. Separate sessions cannot eliminate a shared source blind spot.

Worked design example: an offline decision dossier

This is a hypothetical end-to-end passage, not an implementation or test receipt. Suppose the IntentRequestRequest is to add a Markdown dossier exporter to an application. The software must preserve a dossier's content and decision states without modifying its source or making network requests during export. A pinned sample dossier supplies the test fixture.

Before the representation has evidence, the coordinator could allocate a bounded discovery probe: examine one fixture containing accepted, unresolved, and unknown-status items and propose a representation that preserves them. Support explains why this probe could settle the design; measure binds source immutability, no network use, and a cost ceiling within the task budget. The returned representation and observations determine the next step; an attractive proposal alone does not justify full construction.

Later, if candidate Y1 drops an unresolved item, that observation defeats its preservation claim. The probe earns methodological credit for exposing the omission; the candidate earns no pass. Repair receives further effort only with an identified correction, renewed affected checks, and remaining budget. Hod can also reject the misleading progress signal of counting only accepted decisions exported. If the result is inconclusive instead, retain that uncertainty and decide whether a further discriminating probe is justified.

Follow the same aspect through successive attempts

The following is one hypothetical schedule for that example. C0 is the unchanged acceptance contract. O and S label opening and structuring reports, D a design, and Y an assembled software candidate; these are local example labels. Parallel rows show eligibility, not measured runtime overlap. Every reply follows receipt of the report it answers.

To see what wave 9 must decide, suppose a fixture hypothetically reveals that two visually identical but code-point-distinct record IDs were merged. If D1 already distinguishes exact source identity from display labels, repair the construction defect. If D1 equates normalized display keys with source identity, Binah must revise the design distinction. C0 continues to require identity preservation. The finding might expose a choice between an exact-value appendix and an identity-preserving reference table. Chokhmah can explore that choice if it materially affects the decision; naming an alternative does not make it the winner. Missing original information remains a source gap.

flowchart TD
    K["Keter: frame C0"] --> O1["A: opening 1 · Chokhmah"]
    K --> S1["B: structure 1 · Binah"]
    O1 --> X["Exchange actual reports<br/>Join usable knowing · Da'at"]
    S1 --> X
    X --> P["Support · Chesed"]
    X --> G["Measure · Gevurah"]
    P --> R["Exchange actual claims<br/>Compose D1 · Tiferet"]
    G --> R
    R --> N["Construct · Netzach"]
    N --> Y1["Assemble Y1 · Yesod"]
    Y1 --> H["Review exact Y1 · Hod<br/>Required verification"]
    H --> F{"What did the evidence change?"}
    F -- "implementation only" --> N2["Repair · Netzach"]
    F -- "structural assumption" --> S2["Structure 2 · Binah"]
    S2 -- "consequential option" --> O2["Opening 2 · Chokhmah"]
    S2 -- "structure suffices" --> D2["Settle D2 · Tiferet"]
    O2 --> E2["Structure and compare alternatives"]
    E2 --> D2
    D2 --> N2
    N2 --> Y2["Assemble Y2 · Yesod"]
    Y2 --> H2["Review exact Y2 · Hod<br/>Renew affected checks"]
    F -- "acceptance fulfilled" --> A["Target-owner admission"]
    H2 -- "acceptance fulfilled" --> A
    A --> M["Observed effect · Malkhut"]

This diagram expands one possible repair; the table and return rules govern its omitted branches. Y1 can finish without Y2. An unresolved or budget-exhausted return stops without promotion. The picture is a design schedule; current LychD GraphStep MapStep Map execution remains serial. The Tree's geometry describes the reusable relations, while these repeated labels show how one task can instantiate them.

Correction here changes an artifact, a question, or the allocation of further work; it does not by itself update model parameters. Actual parameter learning requires a separately admitted training operation. Retained examples and model updates continue through Soulforge's discernment training; the Ouroboros cycle connects those passages without admitting them automatically.

Put the graph above execution

For an initial repository campaign, follow Development bootstrap: retain the actual platform boundary, prove one candidate passage, then qualify the native handoffs incrementally. Its implementation queue keeps current delegation evidence separate from later native lifecycle ownership.

The workflow graph carries the engineering sequence: which question or action comes next, what its input means, and what can settle it. SpellweaverWorkflow EngineWorkflow Engine owns that logical ordering under ADR 28. DispatcherTraffic ControllerTraffic Controller resolves an eligible capability for a placement, and OrchestratorStage ManagerStage Manager converges the physical resources needed to serve it. Neither chooses the engineering goal or turns a model's preference into a new workflow edge.

The following primitives are bounded contracts for designing that graph. Their names describe semantic work; they do not require one model, Agent, or subprocess per box. Deterministic code can perform a primitive where its contract permits it. Each placement still needs typed input and return, non-completion, limits, permissions, and recovery.

Independent judgment also needs a placement with its own input and acceptance contract; the primitives above are not a closed catalogue. Discovery finds owners and useful context, while execution roads selects the admitted labor boundary. An A2AAgent-to-Agent LineAgent-to-Agent Line exchange can carry an engineering task, but transport cannot replace artifact revisions, custody, or lineage.

An external comparison is Anthropic's Building Effective Agents: its orchestrator-workers pattern separates task decomposition, delegation, and synthesis; its evaluator-optimizer pattern iterates an output against feedback and explicit criteria. These are useful comparison forms for Inquiry and repair. Here, the campaign coordinator handles logical work; LychD's OrchestratorStage Manager retains physical readiness. Reciprocal rebuttal, privacy-preserving handoffs, and the two-pressure allocation policy still need their own matched evidence.

The Altar review route keeps those questions connected without creating another dashboard. AtlasProject BoardProject Board can retain the concern; BridgeChatChat receives ana IntentRequestRequest and its CircleTask BubbleTask Bubble identifies the admitted RunJob RecordJob Record; LoomWorkflow ViewerWorkflow Viewer explains its exact declared score; OrbRun InspectorRun Inspector exposes retained evidence and gaps; NexusModel Status BoardModel Status Board explains an observed physical transition. An operator campaign outside LychD has its own task and artifact identities, not an invented RunJob Record. These existing instruments do not yet supply an executable Creation PatternWorkflowWorkflow, an Inquiry dossier projection, or support/measure signals. A later interface must receive those records from their owners before drawing progress or offering an action.