Articles and Essays

Genesis

The original series — a problem-first path from truth, capture, and commitment through trustworthiness, decision-making, applications, and synthesis. Nine parts; read in order.

Also browse by thread — the same articles sorted by domain rather than authorship order.

Part I — The Problem Is Truth

Where Everything Breaks

Nine failures, one problem wearing nine costumes

Truth Doesn't Change

The axiom that everything else follows from

Capturing Truth — and the Schema-Evolution Myth

How truth gets into a system in the first place, and why doing it wrong shows up as schema churn

Part II — Atoms, Capture, and the Real

What the irreducible units of truth are — and why the most important ones go unrecorded

Ground truth proper — necessary and contingent — and why reality never waits for our axioms

Captured Evidence

Tier one — what the log can claim, and what it cannot

Four Capture Modes

Tier 1 contains only events

Thinking by Writing

Decision as emission — why humans and machines both reason in symbols, and why capture is not the same for each

Part III — Commitment and Accountability

The Moment of Commitment

Where derivations become decisions and accountability crystallises

But Commitment Is Not Enough

Authority, weight, and the difference between rank and standing

When Facts Are Wrong

Corrections, amendments, and compensating transactions

Part IV — The Facets of Trustworthiness

Every Statement Has a Tier

Tracking the strength of a claim is a commitment to truth, not a claim to certainty

The Epistemic Ladder

Fourteen levels from the Real to the refuted claim — and the rules for climbing honestly

Why Atomicity Matters

How far an artifact sits from the irreducible — and why that governs what may depend on it

Why Uncertainty Matters

How confidently an artifact reflects the truth — at the moment you actually use it

Disposition and Processor Fidelity

When the judge — not the evidence — distorts trust

The Facets Composed

Six orthogonal facets, one question: how much may I trust this?

What Information Theory Says

The formal underpinning of the facets

Part V — Uncertainty at the Commitment Boundary

When Trustworthiness Is Not Enough

World vs method, genuine vs false uncertainty, and politics at the bind

When the Commitment Boundary Needs Reinforcing

Severity, task nature, and who is affected

Strengthening the Commitment Boundary

Challenge, calibration, and independent review at the bind

When Social Stability Matters More Than Quality

Legitimacy, authorization, and acceptance — not better decisions

Meritocracy — The Sweet Spot

Where quality meets legitimacy — and why it has been so hard to build

Part VI — Collective Commitment and the Record

We Already Decided

When holding course is rational — and why those cases are rare

Decision Principles and the Record

Seven irreducible rules, one log, and why honest decisions need both

Architectural Decision Records

Industry ADR, corpus (A)DR, and why hypothesis closure matters at bind

Part VII — Scaling Decision-Making

One Authority Per Invariant

The principle that makes distributed systems consistent makes organisations accountable

Enforcing Invariants Without Locks

Partition writes to single authorities — coordinate at routing, not at commit

One Authority Per Invariant — At Scale

How the single writer principle applies when multiple product teams share cross-cutting obligations

Part VIII — Applications

LLMs at the Commitment Boundary

Classifying every meaningful LLM variant — and why the harness, not the model, sets the trust

Event Sourced Science

Why the ML reproducibility crisis is an architecture problem

From Immutable Events to Immutable Software

Why a foundation of atomic ground truth makes software cheap to extend in the age of AI

Immutable Infrastructure

Why containers are a statement about truth

Part IX — Synthesis and Epilogue

The Unified Theory

One problem. One axiom. Six facets. Zero coincidences.

What this opens — biases, dispositions, and AI in service of truth under uncertainty

Epilogue — The Python Detour

What a language comparison taught us about guarantees