Architecture Decision Records (Covenants)
Prophecy names the destination. A Covenant decides what may be built.
The Covenants are LychD's technical law. Each one owns a decision, the forces that shaped it, and the invariants that later work must preserve. They are living contracts: the current text states the current architecture, while version history records how that law changed.
Use this page to find the smallest decision that owns a question. Follow related Covenants only where the boundary crosses more than one office.
State of Work answers a different question: what current evidence supports. An accepted Covenant can govern an organ that has not yet entered matter.
The Return from Myth to Law
The Great Work supplies constitutional pressure, never technical proof. Its images return through engineering invariants that can be implemented, tested, refused, and repaired:
| Constitutional pressure | Engineering return | Owning Covenants |
|---|---|---|
| A boundary creates perspective without claiming the whole | explicit scope, isolation, and least authority | Security, Layout, IAM |
| A name makes an act answerable | stable identity, attribution, and consequence | Graph, Identity |
| Memory must remain corrigible | provenance, retention, correction, and recovery | Persistence, Memory |
| Imagination cannot write reality by itself | isolated simulation and an explicit promotion gate | HitL, Simulation |
| Another center remains real | consent, refusal, revocation, and bounded delegation | HitL, IAM, A2A |
| Coherence must not require one planetary throne | operator-controlled runtimes, node-local refusal, and bounded federation | Containers, Orchestrator, A2A, Legion |
| A changed form does not erase its source | privacy lineage, local transformation, and exact declassification | Security, Persistence, Context |
| Power must meet consequence | correlated evidence and adversarial evaluation | Observability, Evaluation |
| Repair may change the vessel | versioned creation, rollback, evolution, and promotion | Creation, Evolution, Assimilation |
The full cosmology lives in Transcendence. A Covenant may name the telos it serves, but its decision must stand on technical requirements and consequences.
Foundation and Governance
| Question | Covenant |
|---|---|
| Which reciprocal boundary and contribution terms govern covered code and separate work? | 00 — License |
| How do lore, evidence, code, and the current documentation topology govern one another? | 01 — Philosophy |
| Which historical stack and register discipline formed the Hexanomicon? | 02 — Documentation |
| Which tools and gates define repository quality? | 03 — Quality |
| Which tests prove which kinds of behavior? | 04 — Testing |
| How may native and external organs extend the body? | 05 — Extensions |
Body, Host, and Runtime
| Question | Covenant |
|---|---|
| Where does committed state live? | 06 — Persistence |
| What must a recoverable snapshot bind together? | 07 — Snapshots |
| How are rootless service bodies manifested? | 08 — Containers |
| Which trust boundaries protect the host, data, and network? | 09 — Security |
| How are privileged effects proposed, authorized, and recovered? | 10 — Privilege |
| Which application architecture governs the Vessel? | 11 — Backend |
| How are Settings and Runes loaded, composed, and validated? | 12 — Configuration |
| Which paths does LychD own, preserve, or refuse to delete? | 13 — Layout |
| How are durable jobs executed and recovered? | 14 — Workers |
| Which browser architecture and transport boundary govern the Altar? | 15 — Frontend |
| How does a candidate organ move from Lab to promoted matter? | 16 — Creation |
| How are source, packages, images, and receipts bound into a release? | 17 — Packaging |
| How may the body alter itself without severing recovery? | 18 — Evolution |
| Which command grammar and destructive safeguards govern the Pulse? | 19 — CLI |
Agency, Memory, and Consequence
| Question | Covenant |
|---|---|
| What is an Agent and how is its capability assembled? | 20 — Agents |
| How is bounded Context assembled and governed? | 21 — Context |
| How are capability demand, state, and grants resolved? | 22 — Dispatcher |
| How are physical readiness and scarce resources converged? | 23 — Orchestrator |
| How do graphs checkpoint, pause, resume, and delegate? | 24 — Graph |
| How does human consent survive pause and re-admission? | 25 — HitL |
| How may sovereign Liches address one another? | 26 — A2A |
| How are Seeds admitted, retrieved, corrected, and reanimated? | 27 — Memory |
| How do Products package Compositions, how are Spells woven into immutable Scrolls and attributable castings, and how do human-attested regions stop for live review? | 28 — Workflow |
| Which evidence makes an execution legible without granting authority? | 29 — Observability |
| How are search, fetch, render, and extraction effects contained? | 30 — Web Acquisition |
| How are speculative worlds isolated, judged, and promoted? | 31 — Simulation |
| How are Persona, Sigil, attribution, and revision bound? | 32 — Identity |
| How are training corpora admitted and resulting weights promoted? | 33 — Training |
| How are capabilities tried, calibrated, and compared? | 34 — Evaluation |
| How does foreign craft pass through Lab, test, and promotion? | 35 — Assimilation |
Senses, Network, and Federation
| Question | Covenant |
|---|---|
| How are visual artifacts transformed with provenance intact? | 36 — Vision |
| How are speech and audio transported, retained, and interrupted? | 37 — Audio |
| How do Sigils, roles, grants, and revocation enforce identity? | 38 — IAM |
| How does the Tether admit remote peers and routes? | 39 — VPN |
| How does the Veil terminate transport without becoming application authority? | 40 — Proxy |
| How are paid effects reserved, signed, committed, and reconciled? | 41 — X402 |
| How may many physical nodes serve one sovereign control plane? | 42 — Legion |
Changing a Covenant
The numbered Covenant register is closed at 42. New architecture amends or rewrites the smallest existing Covenant that owns the decision; it does not add another Covenant number. Version history keeps displaced law legible when a decision is reversed.
Every change preserves three seams:
- Law: the Covenant states the decision and its invariants.
- Operation: the owning Sepulcher, Altar, or Composition page shows how that law is used.
- Evidence: State and its linked source, tests, lockfiles, or receipts show what has entered matter.
Authoring mechanics and verification commands belong in CONTRIBUTING.