Architecture

Actors have verbs. Infrastructure has prepositions.

The locked convention distinguishes agents from infrastructure. People and entities represent agents: they observe, plan, commission, act, design, conform, compile, test, judge, embody, destroy, or reveal. Places, systems and phenomena represent infrastructure: they are the contexts under, in, or from which agents operate.

“Infrastructure” does not mean passive. It means the component provides a neutral capability rather than exercising a preference about what ought to happen.

Nissa observes and reports. Tamiyo plans. Narset commissions and acts. Momir designs. Elesh conforms. Tezzeret compiles. Urabrask tests the compiled result in Tolaria. Augustin judges the resulting evidence under Leyline. Kasmina embodies the admitted growth. Emrakul destroys what no longer earns continued tenancy. Sarpadia retains every precedent. Oona reveals the account.

The canonical sentence — a compact authority map. docs/design/02-constitution.md §5.3

Architectural planes

The newsroom principle

The resemblance to a newsroom is structural rather than decorative. A newsroom separates source observation, assignment, authorship, standards review, production, fact-checking, publication judgement, correction, archive and presentation because allowing one desk to control the complete chain corrupts both evidence and accountability.

Narset does not send the photograph. Nissa sends the photograph directly to Momir. Narset sends only the assignment brief.

That rule turns into a concrete code-review question: does this field belong in an assignment brief, or does it impose an editorial angle? Scope, region, resource class, deadline, maturity mode and assurance class are assignment fields. A deficit diagnosis, topology preference, ancestor choice, expected mechanism or proposed solution is an editorial angle, and is schema-invalid in Narset's channel.

The metaphor is never the enforcement mechanism. Enforcement is contractual: direct evidence publication, a narrow GrowthIntent, deterministic request resolution, immutable provenance, and tests that reject diagnostic or structural hints in Narset's channel.

The loops

Observation and commissioning

Assurance and adjudication

Control hierarchy

Tamiyo
  └── establishes StrategicEnvelope
        └── Narset chooses local actions
              ├── WAIT
              ├── COMMISSION_GROWTH → GrowthIntent
              ├── BEGIN_MATURATION
              ├── REQUEST_QA
              ├── REQUEST_ADJUDICATION
              ├── BEGIN_BLEND
              ├── HOLD
              ├── ABORT
              └── COMMIT

After COMMIT:
  Narset relinquishes ordinary ownership
        └── Emrakul manages physical maintenance
              ├── REQUEST_REVIEW
              ├── HOLD
              ├── SEDATE
              ├── DECAY
              └── LYSE

The sentence test

Because each domain owns a verb, the narrative grammar doubles as a cheap architecture lint. A sentence that sounds wrong usually describes a real responsibility leak.

Nissa published the same TelemetryEnvelope
  to Narset and Momir.
Narset issued a GrowthIntent for Region A
  under Tamiyo's envelope.
Urabrask requested a deterministic trial
  in Tolaria.
Augustin selected no-op from the certified
  evidence.
Kasmina rejected a lifecycle command whose
  Augustin warrant was invalid.
Oona displayed the rejection without
  altering the run.

Narset forwarded a captioned telemetry
  summary to Momir.
Narset requested an attention-like topology.
Nissa recommended a wide bottleneck.
Tolaria rejected the candidate.
Urabrask issued the admission token.
Augustin reran the branch with a more
  favourable batch.
Tezzeret inserted a new semantic node
  during optimisation.
Oona changed the learning rate directly.

The full catalogue of smells — observation to likely cause — is in docs/design/03-principles.md, Appendix A. The sentence test is not a proof; it is an intentionally cheap first filter, backed by Leyline contracts and authority tests that do the real enforcement.

Dependency direction

The naming grammar implies two rules. Agents may consume neutral services from Leyline, Tolaria and Sarpadia through typed interfaces. Infrastructure must not import agent policy or encode agent-specific preferences.

Namespec 1.0 is locked. Changing a codename or moving an authority between names requires an architecture decision record, because it changes package paths, telemetry names, tests, and the shared responsibility grammar.

• Why this design →

  The documented record that forced measured counterfactuals, and the armour-and-forward-motion rule that shapes what gets built next.

• The guarantees →

  The spine of the 45 blocking invariants: determinism, mandatory no-op, lexicographic admission, warrants, complete history.