Repository documentation

Component authority is an append-only evidence projection

A Component's authored component.md says what the Component is and does. It does not say which artifact currently has implementation authority. Literate AI records that fact separately as an immutable, content-addressed projection under provenance/component-authority/.

stateDiagram-v2
    [*] --> Source: source inventory
    Source: source-authoritative
    Source --> Assisted: specification derivation
    Assisted: spec-assisted
    Assisted --> Retained: human acceptance
    Retained: derived-source-retained
    Retained --> Fungible: regenerative qualification
    Fungible: regeneratively-qualified-fungible
    Fungible --> Retained: semantic, policy, or verifier invalidation

Every arrow creates a new projection that names its predecessor and the exact evidence for the transition. The store rejects a skipped state, a fork from stale history, a rewrite at an existing digest, a broken predecessor, and content whose digest does not match its file name. Facts that do not exist yet are JSON null; Literate AI does not invent hashes to make an incomplete record look complete.

Human acceptance of a source-derived specification deliberately stops at derived-source-retained. Only a separate regenerative qualification can make source fungible. Qualification binds the Component revision, target lock, complete Flavor/skill/workflow/routing closure, verifier, policy, and evidence. A change to any of those inputs makes the effective state retained-source again.

The original source is evidence, not generation input. Promotion journals live under provenance/source-promotion/, outside every Component and specification root, and the authority projection contains only the promotion record's content identity. Retention is independent of authority: neither a transition nor qualification deletes source.

Inspect a project with:

litai spec status . --json

The response distinguishes the recorded state from the effective state and lists machine-readable blockers such as regenerative-qualification-required or verifier-changed.