THE RULES ARE READ BEFORE THEY CHANGE
Every constraint the fleet obeys lives in a versioned, immutable registry with effective dates and a citation. The beam sweeps the platform's published pages for changes, and every rule carries its own confidence marker — because a number without a citation is a fabrication.
THIRTEEN SYSTEMS, FIVE DOMAINS, ONE BEAM
The docs' central correction: there is no single detection surface. There are thirteen distinct systems across five domains — spec, file, distribution, account, legal — with different owners, triggers and consequences, and the severity ladder runs from upload fails, immediate and fixable all the way to lose the business — liability. The Sentinel doesn't fight any one of them; it keeps the map current. When a rule moves — the way the originality change moved which surfaces were even in scope — a versioned registry with effective dates means the fleet asks "what were the rules on the date this was validated?" instead of redeploying every ship.
WHAT THE BEAM CAN DO
| Capability | Evidence | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Versioned, immutable spec schema with effective dates | T-104 | LANDED |
| Pinned-version lookup API — ask for the rules as of any date | T-105 | LANDED |
| Source citation + confidence marker per rule: [Documented] · [Inference] · [Unknown] | T-106 | LANDED |
| The pipeline reads its rules from the registry, not from in-repo config | T-107 | LANDED |
| Policy-page watcher with an operator alert — a human reads the change, not a regex | T-110 | LANDED |
| Source catalogue restricted to rights-cleared assets — owned, licensed, partnered | T-109 | LANDED |
| Insights ingestion draws on the TokenShield budget grant like everything else | T-108 | LANDED |
| DSA appeal-state surfacing — the regulator's appeal rights, visible in the system | T-102 | LANDED |
| Audit assembly that answers AU-03 mechanically, not archaeologically | T-103 | LANDED |
| Assertion test that no scraping paths exist in the codebase | T-111 | LANDED |
| A fourth evidence tier, [Measured] — for what we verified rather than read | #200 | OPEN QUESTION |
| CI's green depends on unpinned outside-world inputs — three of them | #183 | OPEN QUESTION |
LANDED MEANS MERGED WITH TESTS IN THE REPOSITORY — NOTHING HERE IS GENERALLY AVAILABLE YET. THE OPEN QUESTIONS ARE LISTED BECAUSE WE DOCUMENT GAPS.
WHAT MOVES IN THE DARK
The Sentinel rides ig-index — the read-heavy deck that owns what the fleet knows: the spec registry, own-account metrics, the rights-cleared source catalogue, and the policy watch. When this deck goes dark the others sail on cached knowledge — degraded, not stopped; publishing never depends on the lighthouse being lit this second.
A rule without a citation is a fabrication. The beam marks every rule it carries [Documented], [Inference] or [Unknown] — and saying "unknown" out loud is the discipline that keeps the other two markers worth anything.
WHY THE LIGHT SWEEPS THE PLATFORM'S PAGES — NEVER ITS USERS