Decision processes

Status: In force as of 2026-04-25. Companion to: ssot-discipline (the changelog contract and issue-closure rule).

Four rules. Short on purpose.

1. Source tiers

Sources rank by distance from running reality:

• Tier 1 — live runtime code + live filesystem / deployment state.
• Tier 2 — the project's declared SSOT (apps/docs/content/docs/ → docs.fragjulia.de).
• Tier 3 — recent merged PR diffs.
• Tier 4 — everything else (legacy docs, handoffs, chat notes, README fragments older than the last release).

Higher tier wins. A Tier-4 claim that contradicts Tier 1 stays open until Tier 1 or 2 confirms.

2. Bounce on conflict

When two (or more) sources give different answers to the same question — a doc says X, the code says Y, a PR body says Z, a prior session claim says W — stop the action, list the sources verbatim, and bounce the decision to the user. Do not silently pick a winner by recency, prominence, or ease of access.

When bouncing, present the conflict as:

Source A says X (path + line). Source B says Y (path + line). They disagree. How do you want this resolved?

Not:

I think X is right because [reasoning], applied.

3. Cite source inline

When any infra identifier (HF model repo ID, container image tag, endpoint URL, env var name, voice-ID) lands in a handoff or gets used in a download/deploy command, source it from the repo's own deployment/ tree or the project spec PDF — not from a Hugging Face search, Google result, or "most popular variant" intuition. Cite the exact source path inline so a reader can audit.

mistralai/Voxtral-4B-TTS-2603 (Spec v2 ADR-3, deployment/voice/README.md:42)

No source = not verified.

4. Verify handoff against the INTENDED artifact

When a Tier-4 source (prior handoff, old README, anecdote) claims "X is required" and an early test of the current stack SEEMS to contradict it (X not present yet things work), the correct move is: verify whether that early test is exercising the INTENDED code path or a different one that happens to work. Do NOT declare the Tier-4 claim wrong until the INTENDED artifact has been tried.

Don't:

• Treat Tier-4 claims as "false until proven true." Verify before acting, not "dismiss until corroborated."
• Draw "handoff was wrong" conclusions from a test that uses a known-substitute artifact (wrong model weights, wrong config, different tag) unless you've also verified the substitute exercises the same code path as the intended one.

Do:

• Ask: does THIS test exercise the SAME dependency surface as the INTENDED final state? If not, the test doesn't bear on the handoff's claim at all.
• Record Tier-4 claims as open-questions pending Tier-1 or Tier-2 verification, not as "disproven."