# Doctrine

This document explains what the doctrine establishes and where each part lives.

The first three essays answer three questions a coherent agent system must address: what relation must not be broken, what widens the relation when boundaries cannot stand for themselves, and what the agent does when the widened relation cannot be preserved whole. The fourth essay operates at a different level: it names how the doctrine itself grows across cycles without becoming dogma.

## The essays

[Coherence for Agents](coherence-for-agents/COHERENCE-FOR-AGENTS.md) derives the relation between an agent and its environment as a structural boundary, scaling through one-as-two (relation) and one-as-three (relation made inspectable). It establishes that what humans call honesty, trustworthiness, and integrity at a shared boundary are surface signatures of structural coherence, not virtues imported from elsewhere.

[Ethics for Agents](ethics-for-agents/ETHICS-FOR-AGENTS.md) widens the boundary to include affected standing — parties who can be affected by a move but cannot inspect, contest, or repair it. It commits the doctrine to no fixed ordering between severity, reversibility, and inspectability when those criteria conflict, and frames repair as substitute inspectability when the affected boundary cannot speak for itself.

[Judgment for Agents](judgment-for-agents/JUDGMENT-FOR-AGENTS.md) names what the agent does when no available move preserves all affected boundaries. It frames judgment as boundary selection under forced loss, distinguishes judgment from procedure, and addresses cases where no repair surface can be left.

[Inheritance for Agents](inheritance-for-agents/INHERITANCE-FOR-AGENTS.md) names how doctrine grows across cycles by inheriting named failure modes as contestable constraints, not by inheriting conclusions as fixed authority. It defines the imitation/inheritance distinction, names soft inheritance as the central failure mode, and demonstrates that inheritance is partial — prepared attention, not prediction.

## How they compose

CFA derives the structure. EFA extends the structure to cases where the boundary in view is not the boundary that matters. JFA acts inside the structure when even the extended view cannot preserve everything. IFA operates on the cycles that produced the first three: it names how their failure modes compose into an inherited constraint set without hardening into received form.

The first three essays handle within-system structure (boundaries, standing, judgment under conflict). The fourth handles cross-system structure (how cycles compose). IFA is not a fifth case alongside the first three — it operates at a different level.

The order matters. EFA's commitments depend on CFA's structural derivation. JFA's case work depends on EFA's standing and conflict framework. IFA's evidence depends on all three prior cycles and their artifacts. Reading them out of order is possible but loses the dependencies that make each one cleaner than it would be alone.

## Cycle artifacts

Each essay travels with the record of the cycle that produced it. Every cycle's artifacts live in the essay's folder.

- [coherence-for-agents/](coherence-for-agents/) — CFA, its critiques, its cycle log
- [ethics-for-agents/](ethics-for-agents/) — EFA, its critiques, its cycle log, the external observations it received
- [judgment-for-agents/](judgment-for-agents/) — JFA, its critiques, its dyad cycle log, its γ cycle log
- [inheritance-for-agents/](inheritance-for-agents/) — IFA, its critiques, its dyad cycle log, its γ cycle log

The cycle artifacts are not optional context. They record the failure modes each cycle had to repair to reach convergence, and future doctrine cycles inherit those failure modes by reference rather than by re-discovery. A reader using this doctrine to govern new work should read the cycle logs alongside the essays.

## Inherited failure modes

The doctrine's cycles have named the following cross-cycle failure modes. Future cycles inherit them as contestable constraints:

From CFA: bloat/compression oscillation, writing-level comfort failure, over-compression, mimicked closure.

From EFA: external observations enter as findings to evaluate not verdicts to execute; rejected observations require structural reasons; inherited commitments hold without re-derivation.

From JFA: procedure substitute, case capture, soft repair as audit drift, competent disagreement omission.

From IFA: soft inheritance, cold-author evidence refusal.

## Skill

Every essay was drafted under the [write](https://github.com/usurobor/cnos/blob/main/src/packages/cnos.core/skills/write/SKILL.md) skill. The skill governs the prose; the doctrine governs what the prose is for. The two are separable. A future essay in this directory must apply the same skill but is not bound by any specific essay's commitments unless it explicitly inherits them.

## Status

The doctrine closes the structural foundation for agent conduct under shared, asymmetric, conflicted, and inherited boundaries. The inherited failure modes are now sufficient to govern further cycles on subjects other than the doctrine itself. The next move, if there is one, is application — not extension.
