Registers

Three append-only logs at docs/streams/ that are the system's memory: what invalidated a plan (FINDINGS), what raw ideas are queued (INTAKE), and what each cadence retro decided (RETRO). These are the audit trail — and the rules that protect them are the reason the system catches tampering.

FINDINGS

Knowledge that invalidates a brief. A new finding flags every affected brief as stale-knowledge and excludes it from Next-up until the finding resolves.

Each finding entry carries:

Typed ID: F-NN, sequence-contiguous — a gap trips --lint.
Date and title: when it was recorded and what it is.
Body: what was found, the evidence, and the fix direction.
Affects: typed IDs of the briefs it invalidates. The validator cross-applies these.
Ack (optional): the desk's on-record judgment that the finding is real.
Resolved: yes or no. Resolve by updating the affected brief and flipping this field.

Why sequence-contiguity matters. This rule exists because a register deletion was once caught only by luck: a parallel implementation happened to carry a regression test. The gap is the visible signature of a deleted entry — the check makes deletion machine-visible instead of luck-visible.

INTAKE

Raw ideas that enter the system before they become briefs or get rejected. The intake register is the front door — every proposal gets an entry with a disposition.

An intake entry records:

Typed ID: I-NN, sequence-contiguous.
Date and title.
Body: the idea, motivation, and scope.
Disposition: accepted (becomes a brief), deferred, rejected, or duplicate.

Withdrawal is a tombstone in place — flip the disposition rather than deleting the entry. Deleting an intake entry to make a number disappear both loses the record and trips the sequence-gap check.

RETRO

Per-cadence retro entries (R-NN) recording what the desk decided: which streams to re-prioritize, which briefs to split or demote, and any governance changes. RETRO entries are less frequent than FINDINGS or INTAKE but follow the same append-only, sequence-contiguous conventions.

Shared conventions

Append-only. New entries go at the bottom. Existing entries are never edited away. These logs are the audit trail, and a record you can rewrite is not a record.
Sequence-contiguity is enforced by lint. Numbering must run without gaps or duplicates. A missing number is the visible signature of a deleted entry.
Withdrawal is a tombstone, never a deletion. Keep the number, flip the disposition or resolution, explain the withdrawal in the body.
Typed IDs only. Entries reference briefs and other entries by typed ID (stream/NN, F-NN, I-NN) — never prose names.

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