The words, defined once.

A claim is one statement Preston holds about one named thing.

EXAMPLE

About retry.ts: retries stop after three attempts. One subject, one statement — and Preston holds thousands of them about a repository it has read.

NOT THIS

Not something written for you to read. A claim is stored on its own, and it can turn up in many sentences, or in none at all.

ON SCREEN

Preston prints belief, and beside it what kind of thing it is: a note, a risk, an open question, a decision, a convention, a discipline, a principle. Belief is also the name of one of those kinds, which is confusing exactly once — here.

A support is one recorded reason Preston has for holding a claim.

EXAMPLE

Retries stop after three attempts is held by two supports: the constant in retry.ts, and a test that expects exactly three sends. A support is a reading of something, a step of reasoning from other claims, or a person saying so.

NOT THIS

Not a score, and not a vote. Supports are separate named things that can be withdrawn one at a time. A claim with no live support left is not a weak claim; it is a withdrawn one.

ON SCREEN

You meet it as the consequence: Preston says a belief with independent support has climbed from a guess to something it can state plainly.

Provenance is what a support records about where it came from: what did the looking, and what it looked at.

EXAMPLE

The support behind the retry claim carries: found by the correctness probe, reading retry.ts, during the run that started on Tuesday.

NOT THIS

Not a reason to think the claim is right — only a record of where it was found. It also outlives the claim: if the claim is later withdrawn, the reading still happened.

ON SCREEN

A line under a belief that begins I noticed this through, and a short handle naming what found it.

Standing is how firmly Preston holds a claim, given the support behind it.

EXAMPLE

Retries stop after three attempts starts out on a single reading. A second, independent support lands and the claim gets firmer. Later someone on your team says the three is deliberate, and it gets firmer again. The sentence never changed; its standing did, twice.

NOT THIS

Not a confidence percentage, and not a measure of how much the claim matters. It reports what the claim has earned and says nothing about how important it is.

ON SCREEN

Five values, met as short phrases rather than as the words themselves: held loosely, stands, ratified, contested — two live readings, neither chosen, and no longer stands. Two of those keep the bare word because no plainer one exists.

A relation is a stated link between two claims, which names what the link is.

EXAMPLE

One service validates every request body against a schema. Another trusts its callers and validates nothing. The relation between those two claims names what they differ about — validation — and how they sit: they have simply gone different ways.

NOT THIS

Not a similarity score, and not a merge. Both claims survive untouched; the relation is a third thing stored beside them, and it disappears if either claim is withdrawn.

ON SCREEN

When two claims pull against each other, what you are shown is called a tension.

An event is a record that something happened to a claim, and what kind of thing happened.

EXAMPLE

The second reading that found the retry ceiling again produces one event: this claim was strengthened. A later reading that finds the ceiling raised to five produces another: this claim was revised.

NOT THIS

Not the claim itself, and not a log line about the program running. A claim is what is held; an event is what happened to it, and both are kept.

ON SCREEN

It is called an observation — the word the receipt beneath a piece of Preston's writing uses when it lists what the writing rests on.

Scope is where a claim applies — which team, and which repository or path.

EXAMPLE

Validate every request body is held for the whole team. One repository is a legacy importer that will never do it, so an exception is recorded at that repository only. Everywhere else the rule is untouched.

NOT THIS

Not a permission level and not a visibility setting. Scope says where something applies, not who is allowed to read it.

ON SCREEN

Scope reaches you as the repository or path a thing is attached to — and, when an exception is accepted, as the words at that repository or path.

An understanding is everything Preston currently stands behind about one subject, addressed to nobody.

EXAMPLE

About the gateway: it trusts an inbound auth header, held firmly, resting on two readings of gateway.ts. That is an understanding. None of it is phrased for anyone, and none of it is a sentence.

NOT THIS

Not a draft of something to say, and not something Preston edits. When it changes, a newer one replaces it and the one before stays readable.

ON SCREEN

You never see the thing itself. What a repository page shows you is the live one put into words.

A candidate is one thing Preston could say, put up for a decision before anything is written.

EXAMPLE

Six things were worth saying about this change. Each one is a candidate, and each one gets a decision: said, said with a hedge, folded into another, held for later, or not said. Nothing simply stops being mentioned.

NOT THIS

Not a draft sentence. A candidate is a pointer at something Preston already holds, and it is decided on while it is still that; wording, if any, comes afterwards.

ON SCREEN

You see the ones that were said, and a list of the ones that were not — each with its reason and the condition that would bring it back.

Audience is who Preston is speaking to.

EXAMPLE

Your team is one audience. A public pull request page is another. The same finding can be cleared for the first and refused for the second.

NOT THIS

Not a filter run over finished text. Each thing Preston might say is cleared for an audience before any sentence is written, so something that was never cleared has no wording that could leak.

ON SCREEN

You see which door you came in: pages inside your workspace are the team audience, a public repository page is the public one. Something held back from you shows as withheld.

A message is one decision to speak: one understanding, to one audience, in one place.

EXAMPLE

One understanding of the gateway becomes two messages — one for your team's channel, one for the public pull request. Each carries its own decision about every candidate, which is how the same finding is said in the first and left out of the second.

NOT THIS

Not the text. A message is the decisions and the material; it can exist, and be a real record of a decision to speak, without a single sentence ever having been written.

ON SCREEN

You meet it only as its result: writing in one place and not another, and where there is none, the word withheld.

A fact is one already-cleared piece of meaning, and the only material a message may be worded from.

EXAMPLE

The message about the gateway carries a fixed list: this file trusts this header, a test covers it, this concern is blocking. Those are its facts. The claims underneath them are never handed over.

NOT THIS

Not a claim, and not a sentence. A fact is what survived the clearing, which is why a sentence built only from facts cannot leak something the audience was never allowed.

ON SCREEN

You see the consequence: every load-bearing part of a sentence has something under it you can open.

An utterance is a sentence Preston actually says, built only from the facts on one message.

EXAMPLE

Three facts — the retry ceiling, the outbox rule, and an open question about request headers — become one paragraph on your repository page. The paragraph is the utterance. The three facts are not.

NOT THIS

Not the claim in nicer words. The wording is disposable and versioned; what it was built from is neither. Preston can replace the sentence without changing anything it holds.

ON SCREEN

An utterance is just the text you read. On a repository page it is labelled the current read; on a pull request it is a review comment or the verdict.