Public law
Open Specification
Defines the normative architecture, constitutional invariants, derivation lattice, and schema contracts. Current experimental reference: v1.1.3 / C₁.
Open the specification ↗Open architecture
Palimpsestus
A public specification and experimental program for systems that preserve provenance, warrant, historical standing, uncertainty, and accountable state transition while they adapt.
Separation of concerns
What must hold is not the same thing as how it is implemented.
The public research architecture is deliberately divided so that implementations can vary without silently changing the governing experimental object.
Public verifier
Conformance Suite
Checks machine-readable structural and provenance invariants against a pinned specification. Passing conformance is intentionally narrower than proving truth or utility.
Open the conformance suite ↗Realization
Implementation
Particular runtime mechanisms, controllers, prompts, search strategies, or domain integrations are implementations of the architecture, not the architecture itself.
Core experimental commitments
Provenance fidelity: claims and state changes should not erase ancestry or inflate warrant beyond what the evidence justifies.
Situated state: an actor does not reason from nowhere; present capability depends on inherited state and current relations.
Accountable transition: future action is constrained by what is structurally possible, historically reachable, and currently warranted.
Preserved uncertainty: unresolved possibilities need not be collapsed merely to obtain a single answer.
Compression with obligations: representation may be reduced only insofar as the warrant needed for later action is preserved.
Research posture
The point is not to accumulate examples.
The important question is whether a frozen specification yields prospective, discriminating behavior across independently constructed implementations and domains.
Where does the architecture continue to earn its claims, what do alternatives do better, and where does Palimpsestus break?