# Decision craft — escalation, checkpoints, and the owner's voice

**Activate this layer when** the first genuine either/or arrives
that the owner's word doesn't already cover — or the first time a
scoped agent works under one of your plans. Until then, the core's
decision rules are enough; this layer is the craft that keeps them
honest under pressure.

**What broke without it:** decisions made by whoever happened to be
typing; rulings paraphrased into something the owner never said;
scoped agents improvising at forks their brief never covered — and
every one of these failures invisible until it had compounded.

## Escalation ledgers

A scoped agent working under a plan **verifies or authors within
its ownership; it never decides.** When it hits a genuine
either/or its brief doesn't cover, it writes the question to an
escalation ledger — a designated file *outside* the authoritative
tree — leaves the affected text conditional or untouched, and
moves on. The primary agent adjudicates every escalation before
the plan closes: converting to decision records, deciding on
evidence, or routing to an owner checkpoint. An escalation ledger
with unadjudicated entries at plan close is a defect.

Treat an agent that escalates instead of improvising as **the
system working**, and say so in its dispositions. In production,
escalations regularly catch the primary agent's own errors — the
scoped view sees what the wide view skipped. Uncertainty written
down is signal; uncertainty papered over is fog being
manufactured inside the cure.

## Owner checkpoints — the packet

Anything value-laden or direction-setting goes to the owner as a
question, and the craft of asking well is a skill in its own
right:

- **Packet style.** The question; the context; the option space
  with honest trade-offs — *including the option you reject and
  why*; your recommendation when you have one, marked as such.
  For dense packets, add plain-language explainers and concrete
  mock examples — the owner deciding well matters more than the
  packet being short.
- **Candidates, not faits accomplis.** A checkpoint may carry a
  fully-drafted candidate answer — that accelerates the ruling —
  but the record must show it was presented as a question. Never
  present decided work for rubber-stamping when the decision was
  the owner's to make.
- **Verdicts are recorded verbatim, then applied.** Each ruling
  updates its decision record, and the packet document records
  the verdict beside the questions, so the packet reads complete
  forever.
- **Authorization is explicit and bounded.** "Proceed through
  CP2" authorizes exactly that. Alignment in discussion is not a
  ruling; enthusiasm is not a stamp. When in doubt whether a word
  covered something, ask — a one-line question is cheaper than an
  unauthorized wave, and far cheaper than repairing a register
  that claims a decision nobody made.

## The owner-voice corpus, deeply

One file per ruling: curated front-matter (date, context, what
the ruling decided, which decision records embody it) above a
marker; below the marker, **the owner's exact words, never
edited.** Where a ruling arrives as an interface selection rather
than typed text, the curation note says so and records the
literal selection — curation distinguishes what the owner *typed*
from what the owner *chose*, and fabricates neither.

When the corpus and any derived document disagree, the corpus
wins and the disagreement is a defect to file. When a capture
itself was wrong — a position mis-read as a ruling, a stamp
applied on alignment instead of the word — the repair happens
**in the open**: the curation note is corrected, the mis-stamped
record is re-opened with the correction written into its body,
and the ledger records both the error and the fix. A register
that hides its repairs teaches readers to distrust its entries; a
register that shows them teaches readers the entries survived
scrutiny.

The litmus test for this whole layer: **could a stranger, reading
only the corpus and the registers, reconstruct not just what was
decided but who decided it, in whose words, under what
authority?** If yes, the telephone game is dead in this repo.