Two theses, tested against the code.
Thesis one, one recurring claimant shape, holds for four seams and fails for
one. The routing cascade, the query source chain, the pre-route resolver ladder
and the digestion tick are one shape. Reach selection is not: ChannelsFor is a
total pure function with no claimants and no losers, and it returns several
winners rather than one.
The digestion tick corrects the brief. loop.Tick is not a first-to-claim walk.
It already has a declared comparator, a gate with named reasons, a loser trace
with LostTo and a loser rescue path. It is the model, not a candidate.
Thesis two holds. The kernel is a package and a convention inside one program.
The framework-sized artifact is the ecosystem contract, and Maven implements its
side twice and a half: Nexus and Praxis share one embedded client, Hexis is a
vendored client in another repo with eleven divergences, four of them defects.
Abstractions: Claim, Record, Arbiter. Claim and Record already exist and neither
is wired. Drop Claimant, because every seam already rejected an interface for
the same reason.
Authorization stays out of both artifacts.
Plan 19 was already taken by 19-dialogue-arbitration.md, so this is 20.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
claude
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