You record evidence. Stages follow.

Create a ticket

tik new support-request --title "login fails on Firefox"

The ticket pins the process definition’s content hash at creation, so it is judged by the rules it was minted under until somebody deliberately moves it with tik reprocess.

Created beneath a store, a ticket inherits its context as signed facts: repo=<name> from the enclosing git repository, plus any .tik-facts.edn maps on the way down, nearest winning, with anything explicit beating both.

Assert facts

tik set 3184 severity=:high resolution.ref=abc123def456

Dotted keys nest, so parked.reason="waiting on legal" writes the path [:parked :reason]. Values parse as EDN, and a bare word becomes a keyword — severity=high and severity=:high mean the same thing, which keeps facts out of the swamp of free-form strings.

Links are facts too:

tik set 3184 link.depends-on=9c21f0a4

tik next then holds 3184 back while 9c21 is unsettled, and tik status names the blocker.

Attach evidence

tik attach 3184 ./crash-repro.sh
tik comment 3184 reproduced on a clean profile, video attached

Artifacts are stored by hash. A comment is an artifact too — a text blob attached by its digest — which is why comments need no event type of their own.

Correct the record

Nothing is edited or deleted. Corrections are new events:

tik set 3184 severity=:critical              # supersedes; history retained
tik retract 3184 resolution.ref --reason "wrong commit"
tik dispute 3184 category --reason "this is billing"
tik dispute 3184 category --withdraw         # take back your own objection

A later assertion supersedes an earlier one. A retraction says the claim should not exist and offers no replacement. A dispute rejects the value that stood when it was raised, so only a different value answers it. In every case the stage regresses by derivation — there is no rollback step.

Signed claims and attestations

tik attest 3184 {:ci :green}

An attestation is a signed claim whose meaning the kernel does not interpret. Lenses read it, and the :attested-within guard checks that a fresh-enough one exists — a replayed “CI green” from last month is cryptographically valid and fails that guard honestly.

Derive facts from the world

tik probe 3184

A probe is any executable that prints key=value lines. It runs with its working directory in the ticket’s [:repo] repository, and changed values land as ordinary signed facts, so a ticket regresses on its own when reality does. The environment carries TIK_TICKET, TIK_REPO, and every present fact as TIK_FACT_<PATH>, which is what lets one repository hold many subjects — a package, tenant, or workload per ticket.

Recurring and bulk work

tik recur weekly-review --period 2026-W32
tik rollout dependency-audit --parent-title "Q3 audit"

recur mints this period’s ticket exactly once: it creates only when no ticket already carries that period label. The schedule lives outside the log — run it from cron or a timer — and tik derives whether the period exists yet. rollout creates one ticket per git repository under the store, wired to a parent by link facts, so the parent is a checklist whose checkmarks derive from each child’s evidence.