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dormouse

History, not truth

Nothing in this directory may be cited as evidence in an argument. A file here is a record of what was believed on a date, kept whole because deleting it would delete the only copy of a measurement nobody took again. When one of these contradicts a live document, the live document is right and this one is history.

Git already keeps every version of every file. This directory exists for a different reason: a reader who opens a document must be able to tell, from where it sits, whether it is describing today’s tree or a tree that has since been cut.

What earns a place here

Section titled “What earns a place here”
  1. A document about a mechanism that was deleted — the whole-loop fused/ module (ADR-0009), the sparse-attention MSA arm (ADR-0014), the PonderNet era (ADR-0013). The retraction is in AGENTS.md §3.2; the measurement behind it is here, because it was never re-taken.
  2. A document a newer document replaces — three program plans where one survives (docs/architecture/PLAN.md), and tier-a-references.md, whose table is docs/protocols/ORACLE-TIERS.tsv now, which is also the file tools/oracle_gate.py reads.
  3. A process byproduct — a survey whose verdict is recorded in AGENTS.md, an audit of a tree at a commit, the question sheets for a research agent that has already answered them.
  4. An audit kept whole because its value IS the snapshot — four documents, each a point-in-time reading with every number attached: audit-2026-09-25 · findings-2026-09-29 · fused-verification-2026-09-23 · rmsnorm-kernel-2026-09-30. These four are the only files here the generated site publishes, under its “Archive & retracted” section, for the same reason.

Layout

Section titled “Layout”

The subdirectories mirror the live tree, so a file’s kind is still readable from its path: research/ (dated notes), architecture/ (design documents and superseded plans). The loose files at the top are whole-tree audits.

What is NOT here

Section titled “What is NOT here”

An open finding. A protocol. An ADR. The glossary. A decision sheet awaiting the owner. A paper transcription. Anything a test, a CI job or a program reads by path. If one of those is superseded, it is rewritten to point at what replaced it — not moved here.