Every load-bearing choice in tik has a record: the decision, the context that
forced it, and the consequences that follow. Several exist to name something
tik will not do, which is the part that keeps the model small.
New here, read these four: derived state is never
authoritative
is the one
law written as a constraint on every future feature;
coordination-free
is
its companion; stored bytes are the hashed
region
is why
sha256sum alone audits a store; and three
clocks
is why a guard’s meaning includes
which clock it reads.
These files live in the repository’s knowledge bundle under kb/decisions/,
so a checkout and this site carry the same record.
The laws
| Decision | What it settles |
|---|
| 0013 | Derived material may be cached only if disposable and untrusted. |
| 0021 | No leader, no lock, no consensus — on any correctness path. |
| 0001 | The event-log acceptance test every feature must pass. |
Derivation
| Decision | What it settles |
|---|
| 0005 | Negation inside the fixpoint must be stratified to stay deterministic. |
| 0003 | Concurrent conflicting assertions block guards; people resolve them. |
| 0016 | Explain’s structured reasons are the stable API; the prose is not. |
| 0018 | Conformance is the corpus, the laws, and the normative sweep semantics. |
| 0019 | Effects observe derivation; transport is not a domain concept. |
Time
| Decision | What it settles |
|---|
| 0012 | Three clocks, never conflated; the clock is part of the guard. |
| 0022 | The claimed clock is clamped to the evaluated clock. |
The log and its bytes
| Decision | What it settles |
|---|
| 0004 | Parents are mandatory; the log is a Merkle DAG. |
| 0006 | SHA-256, self-describing ids, one algorithm per store. |
| 0007 | Stored bytes are exactly the hashed region; signatures are detached. |
| 0008 | Canonical serialization is a versioned wire protocol. |
| 0017 | Events are never deleted; blobs may be; nothing compacts into authority. |
| 0020 | The contract every storage backend must honour. |
Trust and authority
| Decision | What it settles |
|---|
| 0010 | Signatures establish authorship; authorization is derived. |
| 0011 | The log admits all well-formed claims; trust is evaluated, not filtered. |
| 0009 | Unknown data is handled differently per layer, on purpose. |
| 0014 | The artifact hash is in the trust domain; the blob is not. |
| 0015 | Definition hash is identity; publication signatures are authority. |
| 0002 | Tickets pin their definition hash; migration is an event. |
