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+# Two artifacts, and neither one is Spring
+
+Proposal. V-585. Related umbrella V-558, and the design collected in
+`docs/plans/19-dialogue-arbitration.md`.
+
+## Verdict
+
+**Thesis one holds for four seams and fails for one.** Four are one shape: the routing
+cascade, the query source chain, the pre-route resolver ladder, the digestion tick. Reach
+selection is not. It maps severity and presence to a set of channels. It has no claimants and
+no losers.
+
+**Thesis two holds.** An arbitration kernel is a package and a convention inside one program.
+It is not a framework. A framework whose only client is the codebase it came from is that
+codebase with more ceremony.
+
+**The answer is two artifacts of different sizes.** One package inside Maven, built from
+`internal/claim` and `internal/decision`. Both already exist and neither is wired. One small
+library across the four services, holding the correlation id, the headers, the timeout policy
+and the named gap. Neither is Spring. The daemons must not get a third.
+
+**The strongest finding is the duplication, not the shape.** Three structural holes make a
+route untrustworthy. They are written out by hand in three files, for three consumers, with
+three return types. `gateLLMDecision` flattens them to a float. `vetoOf` re-derives them as a
+sentence. `thinReason` re-derives them again as a trace string. That is what having no common
+unit costs, and it is countable in lines rather than in taste.
+
+## The five seams, tested
+
+### 1. The routing cascade. The shape, ordered by hand.
+
+The claimant is `router.Grammar` (`internal/router/stage0.go:19`). It holds a name, a regex
+and a `Build` that may still decline. A claim is a regex match plus `ok` from `Build`.
+
+Ordering is the append order in `buildRouter` (`cmd/mavend/voicewire.go:384`). Twelve appends.
+Each one carries a comment arguing its position against its neighbours. First match wins at
+confidence 1.0.
+
+Below stage 0 the two engines are alternatives, not rivals. The classifier runs only when the
+router is nil or errored. Inside the classifier the order is cosine score, and the top three
+are recorded.
+
+Losers are recorded and change nothing. `noteGrammarOutcomes`
+(`internal/router/decisiontrace.go:56`) separates a grammar that did not match from one whose
+`Build` declined. Everything past the winner is marked `NeverAsked`.
+
+### 2. The query source chain. The shape, ordered by hand, with a boundary in it.
+
+The claimant is `querySource` (`cmd/mavend/actions_query.go:45`), a name and one function
+returning `(string, bool)`. Twenty-four of them sit in one slice literal, walked in order. The
+comment on the slice says the order is load-bearing. It is right.
+
+This seam carries something the others do not. The personal boundary at line 139 is a stop,
+not an answer. Everything above it reads the owner's data. Everything below reads the world. A
+question about him that reaches the boundary ends there.
+
+### 3. The pre-route resolver ladder. The shape, and the one that hurts.
+
+Seven rungs, each returning `(reply string, handled bool)`. Ordering is the order of the `if`
+statements in `runTurn` (`cmd/mavend/voice.go:258`). The roster in `preRouteLadder`
+(`cmd/mavend/decisiontrace.go:33`) is kept by hand, and its own comment admits nothing
+enforces the correspondence.
+
+The recurring bug lives here. A rung claims before the utterance is routed. So the claimant
+with the earliest and strongest trigger is the one that knows least about what was said. V-560
+fixed half of it. It computes the route once, before the ladder, and lets the clarify resolver
+read it. The other rungs still decide without reading it.
+
+### 4. The digestion tick. The shape, and the only one already done right.
+
+This corrects the brief. `loop.Tick` (`internal/loop/loop.go:85`) is not a first-to-claim
+walk. It is an arbitration with a declared comparator.
+
+- The claimant is `loop.Rule`. Its `Predicate` says whether it wants the turn.
+- The gate is separate from the claim. `Gate` (`loop.go:21`) checks snooze, cooldown, quiet
+  hours, calendar busy, presence and missing data. `ExplainGate` names which one blocked.
+- The comparator is data, not position. Max severity wins, and ties break on name.
+  `DefaultRules` states outright that slice order is not load-bearing.
+- Losers are recorded with what they lost to. `ExplainTick` (`internal/loop/explain.go:86`)
+  fills `LostTo`, and rewrites the previous best when a higher severity displaces it.
+- Losers get a second life. `DigestEligible` (`loop.go:129`) decides which suppressed
+  candidates are bundled for later. It refuses cooldown and snooze, because neither is
+  restraint.
+
+Every property the kernel wants already exists here, on five rules. The kernel argues that the
+other three seams should look like this one. It does not need a new idea.
+
+### 5. Reach selection. Not the shape.
+
+`ChannelsFor` (`internal/delivery/channel.go:73`) takes severity and presence and returns a
+slice of channels. Nothing claims. Nothing passes. Nothing loses. Every channel in the
+returned slice sends, so there is not even one winner.
+
+Naming the sinks claimants would be the forced abstraction. It would also hide the property
+this table has and the ladders lack. It is total, it is pure, and every cell is covered by
+`TestChannelsForEveryTableCell`.
+
+One thing in the dispatcher does re-decide. `ErrVoiceNoSession` means the presence guess was
+wrong, so the remaining channel list is replaced with the away table
+(`internal/delivery/dispatcher.go:188`). That is a retry on new evidence, not a contest. Leave
+it alone.
+
+### What else has the shape
+
+`fillMatchedSlots` (`internal/router/router.go:212`) arbitrates per slot. A matched value
+always wins, and the extractor fills only what was left empty. That is the coverage-first rule
+the kernel proposes, written once for four slots.
+
+`bestRecall` and the topic veto pick between a fact and a note by score with a margin. That
+one is a real score comparison, and it should stay one.
+
+## The abstractions
+
+Three, not four. The straw man had `Claimant`, `Claim`, `Arbiter` and `Record`. Drop
+`Claimant`.
+
+**`claim.Claim`, evidence rather than a verdict.** It exists at `internal/claim/claim.go`,
+built and tested, imported by one function that nothing calls. It carries `Consumed` and
+`Unexplained` for coverage, an ordinal `Band`, and a `Veto` string that keeps the reason a
+float threw away. Coverage is compared before band. That is the fix for the Rome failure,
+where a parked reminder ate the whole utterance while explaining none of it.
+
+**`decision.Record`, the trace.** It exists at `internal/decision/decision.go` and it is wired
+everywhere. It separates won, declined, lost on score, thinned, merged and never asked. The
+last one is the valuable one. A claimant that never looked reads identically to one that looked and
+passed. That is what hardcoded order hides.
+
+**`Arbiter`, the thing that does not exist.** One function. It takes a set of claims and a
+comparator, returns a winner, and notes the rest. `loop.Tick` is that function, specialised to
+rules. Generalising it is the proposal.
+
+**Against a `Claimant` interface.** Every seam already rejected one, for the same reason.
+`querySource` is a struct of one function because the sources are methods on one handler with
+no state. An interface would mean one empty type per source. `confirmResolver` is the same
+shape, and `loop.Rule` is a struct with a closure. An interface would buy a shared name and
+cost twenty-four empty types. The claimants stay what they are. Each seam builds `claim.Claim`
+values at its own edge, which is what `router.ClaimOf` already does.
+
+## What ordering becomes
+
+Ordering becomes a comparator plus a rank, and the rank is data.
+
+Today ordering is position in a slice, and position is invisible in the record. Add a rung to
+`runTurn`, forget `preRouteLadder`, and the rung vanishes from the trace. The roster's own
+comment admits nothing enforces it.
+
+The proposal is smaller than a dependency graph. A claimant declares a rank. The arbiter sorts
+by coverage, then band, then rank. Rank breaks the tie that evidence cannot break.
+
+**A dependency graph is the wrong tool.** The real constraints are pairwise and local. Day
+plan before calendar. Praxis before the capture marker. Narrative last. A graph turns those
+into edges and then needs a topological sort whose output nobody can read. The twelve comments
+in `buildRouter` would become twelve edges with the arguments deleted. Keep the arguments.
+
+**Two claimants at the same rank must be an error, caught at wiring time.** Not at turn time.
+The registry is built once at boot, so a duplicate rank is a boot failure naming both
+claimants. Falling back to slice order on a tie would restore the invisible ordering the
+kernel exists to remove.
+
+**The roster stops being hand-kept.** A claimant registered with the arbiter is on the roster
+by construction. That deletes the `preRouteLadder` failure mode outright.
+
+## What it buys
+
+**It deletes three copies of one test.** The three structural holes appear in
+`gateLLMDecision` (`internal/router/router.go:271`), in `vetoOf`
+(`internal/router/claim.go:101`), and in `thinReason` (`internal/router/decisiontrace.go:28`).
+Three files, three return types, one rule. A fourth consumer would write it a fourth time.
+With a claim carrying `Veto`, the rule is written once. The float, the sentence and the trace
+string all derive from it. This one is worth the work on its own.
+
+**It makes the recurring bug expressible.** Rome, V-567 and V-577 are one defect. The claimant
+that knows least holds the earliest trigger. Coverage-first arbitration states the fix once,
+in `MoreSpecificThan`. A parked clarify explaining zero tokens of "какая сейчас погода в
+Риме?" loses to a weather claim explaining all of them. Nobody has to encode that a parked
+clarify is less trustworthy than a grammar.
+
+**The limit.** The kernel prevents the class only where the losing claimant
+computes low coverage. Rome, V-567 and V-577 all qualify. Each is a stateful claimant
+swallowing an utterance it explains none of. A claimant that matches a substring does explain
+those tokens, and coverage does not catch it. V-567's substring match is that case from the
+other side. Coverage there has to be measured against the whole utterance rather than the
+matched span. `claimSpans` already does that, in the safe direction. So the kernel
+prevents most of the class and describes the rest. Claiming more would be dishonest.
+
+**It makes contention countable.** Today it is not. The 91-case fixture draws two stage-0
+grammars exactly once, at `ru-query-019`, and both route the same intent. Nobody knows whether
+contention is rare or whether the fixture omits it. An arbiter that sees every claim can
+count.
+
+**What it does not buy.** No accuracy point comes from this alone. Every number in
+`docs/evals/2026-08-05-routing-resident-model.md` is reachable without it. The kernel is a
+place to put the fix, not the fix.
+
+## What it costs
+
+Every seam rewritten is a chance to break a measured number.
+
+Re-measure the 91-case routing fixture. The baseline is 75.8% full and 80.2% intent-only at
+p50 1.19s, in `docs/evals/2026-08-05-routing-resident-model.md`. Judge against the classifier
+and the resident model, because those are what always answer.
+
+Re-measure Praxis reach. The baseline is 27/30 overall, 11/12 Praxis and 5/5 lifecycle, in
+`docs/evals/2026-08-05-praxis-reach.md`. The Praxis grammars are the only path to Praxis, so a
+reordering that demotes them costs every point.
+
+Re-run the nine-scenario interleave probe in `docs/evals/2026-08-06-claimant-interleave.md`.
+Six of nine pass today. That probe measures exactly what this proposal is for.
+
+Re-run the dialogue contract tests from V-563. They are whole multi-turn traces, and the only
+tests that cover the ladder as a ladder.
+
+Latency is the cheap part. A stage-0 query costs 3.7µs. One claim per claimant adds two slices
+and a token split, on a path whose p50 is over a second.
+
+The real cost is the arguments. Twenty-three comments across `buildRouter` and `querySources`
+explain why each entry sits where it does. A migration that turns them into rank integers and
+drops the prose destroys the only documentation the ordering has.
+
+## Migration order
+
+**Step one, no behaviour change. Delete the duplication.** Make `vetoOf` the single definition
+of the three structural holes. Have `gateLLMDecision` and `thinReason` read it. One rule,
+three consumers, no new abstraction. Re-measure the routing fixture and nothing else. This is
+worth landing whether or not the rest does.
+
+**Step two, the proof. Arbitrate the pre-route ladder.** Smallest seam, seven rungs, and the
+one with the measured defect. Each resolver returns a claim instead of a bool. The arbiter
+compares coverage, then band, then rank. The roster comes from the registry. The proof is the
+interleave probe reaching nine of nine with the routing fixture unmoved.
+
+**Step three, the query source chain.** Twenty-four sources, most of which already compute a
+match span. The personal boundary does not become a ranked claimant. It stays a hard stop, and
+the arbiter runs above it and below it separately. Re-measure Praxis reach and the search and
+Kiwix fallback.
+
+**Step four, stage 0, or not at all.** Twelve grammar groups whose order encodes twelve
+arguments, scoring 20/20 on the fixture. Most to lose, least to gain. Defer it until steps two
+and three have sat in the deploy long enough to break something.
+
+**`loop.Tick` moves last or never.** It already has the comparator, the gate with reasons, the
+loser trace and the loser rescue. Rewriting it to call a generic arbiter risks the digest path
+to gain a shared name.
+
+## What must not be in the kernel
+
+**Authorization.** This is the hard line. CLAUDE.md is explicit that LLM output is not
+authorization, and that a confirmation binds capability id, target entity, arguments,
+requester and expiry (`cmd/mavend/confirm.go`). A generic arbiter turns many opinions into
+one winner. That is the wrong shape for a binding. Make confirm a claimant with a rank and a band, and a claim that scored higher could take the
+turn from it. The binding would be softened into a comparison. Confirm may report to the record. It must not compete in the
+arbiter.
+
+The same rule covers the Hexis path. Free text never reaches a mutating call, and resolution
+happens against Nexus. Neither is a contest, so neither is arbitration.
+
+**The personal boundary.** Same reason, different currency. The boundary is not the most
+specific claimant. It is a stop. A boundary that can lose to a higher-coverage claim is not a
+boundary. The failure is the owner's notes reaching a search engine.
+
+**Confidence as a float.** The band exists because the measurement said a calibrated float is
+not available. The classifier scores 62% correct below its median and 62% above, over a spread
+0.083 wide. Its top-two margin has a p50 of 0.009
+(`docs/plans/19-dialogue-arbitration.md`). A kernel with a `Score float64` on the claim invites
+every claimant to invent one. When V-546 lands a softmax head with a calibrated probability,
+that number is read beside the bands, not squeezed inside them.
+
+**Slot extraction and validation.** `fillMatchedSlots` runs after a winner exists, and slot
+validation against the action schema is V-562. Both ask whether a claim is well formed. Neither
+asks which claim wins.
+
+## The second artifact: the ecosystem client
+
+The kernel is Maven's alone. The one thing here with plural clients by construction is the
+contract between the four services. Maven implements its side of it twice and a half.
+
+### Is the contract uniform today? No.
+
+Nexus and Praxis share one implementation. `ecosystemHTTP` (`cmd/mavend/ecosystem.go:62`) is
+embedded in both, so both get the same 10 second timeout, the same `setHeaders`, the same
+typed `ecosystemError`, and the same correlation key. Hexis is a separate client in another
+repository, vendored at `vendor/github.com/kami/hexis/pkg/client`, and it agrees on some of
+that and not the rest.
+
+Eleven divergences. Four of them are defects rather than style.
+
+**A Hexis 401 is spoken as an outage.** Nexus and Praxis return `*ecosystemError` with
+`Unauthorized()`, `ContractMismatch()` and `Unreachable()` classifiers
+(`cmd/mavend/ecosystem.go:144`). Hexis returns `fmt.Errorf` strings
+(`hexis/pkg/client/client.go:157`). So `unauthorizedEcosystemError`
+(`cmd/mavend/ecosystem_acts.go:549`) does `errors.As` and always gets false for Hexis. The
+owner hears "Hexis is down" when the truth is that Hexis refused the credential. The comment
+at `ecosystem_acts.go:32` says that conflation must not happen.
+
+**The Hexis discovery hop is uncorrelated.** Hexis carries its own context key
+(`client.go:81`), invisible to Maven's. The bridge is a manual second stamp at
+`ecosystem.go:546`. `discoverCapabilities` (`ecosystem.go:527`) does not do it, and discovery
+runs before execute, so that call goes out with no correlation id. The doc comment above it
+claims the opposite.
+
+**Causation is computed and never sent.** `causationID` is derived at
+`ecosystem_acts.go:771`. Hexis supports `X-Causation-ID` (`client.go:147`). Nothing passes it.
+
+**A Praxis failure names no service.** `ecosystemGap` (`ecosystem_acts.go:36`) is the shared
+named-gap helper, and Nexus and Hexis call it. Praxis returns per-verb Russian strings instead
+(`ecosystem_acts.go:62`, `:73`, `:84`, `:95`). There is no `servicePraxis` constant. A Praxis
+outage and a Praxis 403 both say "не получилось", with the service unnamed.
+
+The rest are real but smaller. Hexis sends no `X-Requested-By: maven` and no `Accept` header,
+so Hexis cannot attribute a read call to Maven at all. Its timeout is 30 seconds against
+Maven's 10, which Maven cannot change from here. Its success predicate is `>= 400` where the
+shared client uses `!= 200`. `withToken` is duplicated verbatim per client because the
+embedded struct cannot return the concrete type. The version constant `"v1"` is defined twice,
+in two repositories, with nothing keeping the two equal.
+
+### Would a shared library have plural clients?
+
+**Partly verifiable, and the honest answer is that two of the three cannot be checked from
+here.**
+
+Hexis is verified. It is a Go module consumed through a `replace` directive, and it already
+publishes a Go client library that Maven imports. That is an existence proof that the pattern
+works for one of them.
+
+Praxis is suggested and not proven. Two comments reference Go paths in its repository
+(`cmd/mavend/factenrichment.go:4`, `cmd/mavend/ecosystem.go:365`). Nothing here compiles
+against it.
+
+Nexus is unverifiable from this repository. There is an HTTP base URL and some JSON shapes,
+and no language signal at all.
+
+So the claim that a shared library would have plural clients rests on one confirmed adopter
+and two assumptions. Do not present it as settled. The cheaper test is to fix Maven's side first,
+in Maven. Offer the package outward once it has proven itself on one caller.
+
+### What belongs in it
+
+The straw man is right, with one addition.
+
+- The correlation id, minted once per action, with one context key that all clients read. The
+  two-key split is the cause of the uncorrelated discovery hop.
+- Causation, since one of the three already supports it and the value is already computed.
+- The version header and `X-Requested-By`.
+- The timeout policy, as one number rather than 10 in one repository and 30 in another.
+- A typed error with the three classifiers, so a refused credential never speaks as an outage.
+- The named gap shape, so no client invents its own vocabulary the way Praxis did.
+
+### What must stay out
+
+**Authorization, for the second time and the same reason.** The confirmation binding is
+Maven's. It binds capability id, target entity, arguments, requester and expiry, and it lives
+in `cmd/mavend/confirm.go`. A shared client that offered a policy hook would invite each
+service to supply its own, and the binding would become configuration. Free text never reaches
+a mutating Hexis call, and entity resolution stays in Nexus. Neither belongs in a transport
+library.
+
+Retry stays out too, or nearly. The only retry Maven has is Nexus enrichment at the worker
+layer, with backoff from one minute to one hour (`cmd/mavend/factenrichment.go:49`). It is
+there because enrichment is a background job with no listener. A turn cannot retry, because
+the owner is standing there. A transport-level retry in a shared library would hide a
+second budget behind a turn that already has a name for failing.
+
+## The daemons must not get a framework
+
+The instinct is right, and half the work is already done in a way that shows why.
+
+Transport is shared and abstracted. `ipc.Dial` (`internal/ipc/client.go:94`) and `ipc.Listen`
+(`internal/ipc/server.go:202`) both go through `netaddr`. A bare path is a unix socket with
+`SO_PEERCRED` identity. A `tcp://host:port?token=...` address binds a network listener with a
+mandatory token. Callers pass a string and never branch on scheme. That seam made the
+workstation offload a deployment rather than a build. It is a library, it has nine clients in
+this repository, and it earns its weight.
+
+Startup is not shared, and should not be. There are twelve binaries under `cmd/`, each with a
+hand-written `main`, and no common lifecycle package. `cmd/mavend/main.go` runs 830 lines. The
+reason is visible in it. The daemon can boot **locked**, with no store at all, and wire its
+components later from inside an unlock handler. Thirteen subsystem pointers are pre-declared
+nil (`main.go:236`) and filled on one of two paths. The whole graph is built a second time
+inside the unlock path (`main.go:478`). A container owning object lifecycle would have to model
+a graph whose nodes do not exist at boot and may never exist.
+
+The deeper reason is a design property. Every daemon degrades alone, and every ecosystem
+client is nil unless configured. A wiring framework's job is to fail loudly when a dependency
+is missing. Maven needs the opposite: a missing dependency is a named gap in one answer and a
+working daemon everywhere else. An abstraction over startup would trade that property for a
+shorter `main`.
+
+The duplicated locked and unlocked wiring in `mavend` is a real defect and worth fixing. Fix it
+by extracting one function in that file. That is not a framework.
+
+## The honest comparison
+
+Spring and Django own object lifecycle and request handling for applications they have never
+seen. That is where the weight is paid for. The abstraction is general because the clients are
+unknown.
+
+Maven is one application, on one box, with one user. Its clients are known, there are nine of
+them, and they are in this repository. A framework here would be an abstraction with a census.
+
+So the right unit is a shared package and a convention. That is a smaller and more defensible
+claim. The evidence for its size is that both halves already exist in that form, and nobody
+called them a framework. `internal/ipc` is a shared package and a convention, and it carried
+the daemons off the box. `internal/decision` is a shared package and a convention, and it made
+the losers readable in one release. `internal/claim` is the third, written and waiting for a
+caller.
+
+The thing to disagree with: **the answer is two artifacts of different sizes. A package inside
+Maven, a library across the four services, and neither one is Spring.**