Document Before Apply
Write the commitment before you live by it
No mechanism or design choice is adopted in practice until it is documented; documented commitments must be honoured in implementation.
Coherence requires that stated intent and lived behaviour align — at adoption and over time. Document before apply is how that requirement is enforced in design work: the spec precedes the mechanism, the principle precedes the pattern, ethics precedes the value. Tacit adoption — “we always did it this way” — is not governance; it is values drift waiting to be discovered during an audit or incident.
This principle rules out silent override: changing behaviour without changing the record that authorised it. When operations diverge from documentation, the honest fix is either to update the document through a visible process or to restore operations to match what was committed — not to let the gap persist because fixing it is inconvenient.
Document before apply is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is how participants — human and automated — know what rules bind them. The Foundation series argues that facts must not change; coherence demands that commitments about how we handle facts are equally stable and inspectable.