CONCEPT · AUDIENCE

“It told me in chat, but the PR comment says nothing. Which one does it actually think?”

One understanding. Different rooms.

What Preston understands about a subject is one thing. What it says is many — a separate, separately-recorded decision for each audience and each place. Saying it to your team and not on a public pull request is not two opinions; it is one position, addressed twice.

BUILT FROM

standing understanding candidate audience message fact standing grounding restraint

Every word above is defined on the vocabulary page, and every concept above is a page before this one.

THE SHAPE

audience-scoped

ONE POSITION, TWO DESTINATIONS

what Preston stands behind

the gateway trusts an inbound
auth header — gateway.ts:41

→ your team’s channel

said, with the file and the line

→ the public pull request

omitted · unsafe-for-audience

one understanding, two audiences, two decisions

AudienceNothing was forgotten between the two. The public silence is its own recorded decision, with its own reason — which is why it can be read back later and asked about.

WHAT THIS CHANGES

“Withheld” stops meaning “Preston went quiet” and starts meaning something exact: withheld from here. The same finding can be fully said somewhere else, and both facts are on the record.

How one understanding becomes two different messages

WHAT PRESTON UNDERSTANDS

The gateway trusts an inbound auth header. One position about one file, corroborated, with a standing behind it.

THE UNDERSTANDING
What Preston currently stands behind about this subject, with its basis and its standing. It is never prose, and it is never addressed to anyone.
immutable — superseded, never edited
A MESSAGE FOR YOUR TEAM
A separate record naming this understanding, this audience, and this destination. Every candidate gets a decision here — and this one is included, with the file and line, because the audience clears it.
audience: team · destination: your channel
A MESSAGE FOR THE PUBLIC PULL REQUEST
A second record, from the SAME understanding. Here the audience does not clear the underlying facts, so the candidate is omitted with the reason unsafe-for-audience — decided before any editorial judgment is consulted.
audience: public · omitted · silence

WHAT THIS BUYS THE READER

A quiet public review stops being evidence that Preston found nothing. You can ask what it declined to say there, and get an answer.

WHY THIS WORKS

Understanding is singular. Speech is plural.

Nothing upstream of a message is addressed to anyone, and nothing downstream of one invents ground. That split is what lets Preston be candid with your team and careful in public without holding two beliefs. A candidate the room has not cleared is dropped before anyone weighs whether it was worth saying.

TYPED SHAPE

CommunicationAudience

export type CommunicationAudience =
  | { readonly kind: "public" }
  | { readonly kind: "team" }
  | { readonly kind: "group"; readonly who: Ref }
  | { readonly kind: "person"; readonly who: Ref };

packages/types/src/accountable-communication.ts

Public and team name no one in particular and carry no who; group and person name someone and require it. An unaddressed person is the invalid state this shape makes unrepresentable.

Composition →

What it won’t say →