ADR 0012 — the substrate-theory basis, and where the constellation's constitution lives

• Status: proposed
• Date: 2026-06-07
• Refines: 0001 (stretches atlas's charter from structure to also the family's shared semantics)
• Relates: the theory/ track (the exploratory corpus this ADR governs)

The family has begun reasoning about itself as a whole — what the irreducible semantics of the substrate are (authority, form, and candidates like capability and realization), how a new theory is identified, and where it should live. That reasoning is cross-cutting and ownerless: it is not the design of stele, horos, thesmos, or arche alone. It kept happening in chat and in one consumer's research-docs, with no home. By atlas's own membership test it is atlas's to hold — but it is semantic substance, which atlas was explicitly built to not carry. This ADR resolves that tension: atlas hosts the constitution as a deliberate, bounded charter stretch, and a theory graduates to its own repo the moment it crystallizes.

Context

0001 created atlas to own one class of thing: a cross-cutting concern that (a) concerns ≥2 systems or the whole and (b) has no natural single-repo owner — and scoped it to structure ("build & relate"), naming it plainly because it carries no substance of its own.

A second body of cross-cutting work has now appeared that passes the membership test but strains the substance boundary: the constitutional inquiry into the substrate's semantics. It asks what the central goal of the constellation is; what counts as an irreducible substrate semantic; what a theory is (vs a primitive, a vocabulary, a profile); when a theory is required and when it is irreducible; and which theories are missing (artifact/program, capability/affordance, runtime/realization). Three facts about it:

• It is ownerless and family-scoped. It is about ontos/logos/thesmos/horos/stele/arche together, and about systems that do not yet exist. No single repo can own "what theories should the substrate have?"
• Its natural genre already exists in the family — arche's docs/rfcs/ and research-docs/ are exactly this style of deep architectural reasoning. But arche is a consumer (the hardest downstream), and the substrate was decomposed out of arche into the Greek siblings. Hosting the family's forward-looking constitution inside a consumer recreates the monolith that decomposition dissolved.
• It is semantic substance, which is precisely what atlas's charter says atlas does not carry. So atlas is the right scope but, under 0001 as written, the wrong character.

The candidate homes and why they fail: constellation is the synthetic integration gate ("owns no domain logic") — operational, not deliberative; stele is the fact-record runtime — a single substance system; a new repo now would duplicate atlas's "whole-family, ownerless" role and inflate the repo set before any theory has crystallized.

Decision

1. Adopt admissible as the organizing judgment. The substrate's theories are framed as the independent premises of one re-checkable relation, admissible(actor, verb, operand, evidence) — every substrate-sensitive act is an admission any party can re-check. A theory is a premise that must be discharged for admissible to hold, not a free-standing "concern." (Rationale: theory/0001.)

2. Adopt the two tests for theory-hood.

• Required — there is a rightful challenge to some admissible act that no existing theory can discharge (equivalently: removing it forces a hidden decider, an out-of-band registry, semantic overload, no late binding, or no enforcement).
• Irreducible — its central judgment is not a definitional/conservative extension of the others (not derivable from existing vocabulary via logos rules), even though it may reference them — theories are a dependency DAG, not a flat orthogonal basis.
• Discipline: do not make a theory for a noun; make a theory only for an irreducible judgment. (Rationale: theory/0002.)

3. Adopt the four-tier taxonomy and the promotion path. primitive · vocabulary · profile · theory, with concepts pushed down the path (vocabulary → profile → ADR → substance repo) and promoted only when a test forces it. A new repo is created only when a candidate crystallizes into a substance system — never to host the discussion of whether it should. (Rationale: theory/0004.)

4. The constitution lives in atlas — a bounded charter stretch. atlas's remit is extended from structure to also the family's shared semantics and which theories should exist. Concretely:

• a new top-level theory/ area holds the exploratory corpus (essays, derivations, open questions) — peer to topology/ and adr/ as hand-authored truth, deliberately not under docs/ (which is the lint-gated published-export surface declared in atlas.json);
• adr/ holds the settled decisions (this ADR, 0013, successors);
• glossary.md + concepts.json hold the vocabulary.

5. Promote on mass. If the constitutional corpus grows into sustained, irreducible substance with its own gravity, it graduates to its own Greek-named substance repo (the polity's constitution — names deferred), by the same promotion discipline it prescribes. Until then it stays in atlas. This ADR is itself the recursion: the first constitutional decision is where the constitution lives.

Consequences

• atlas gains a theory/ area and a stated semantic remit. The membership test (0001) is unchanged; what changes is the explicit admission that a semantic cross-cutting concern can pass it, not only a structural one. atlas remains plainly named and remains not a runtime dependency — theory/ ships nothing importable.
• A boundary cost: "what does atlas carry?" is now two-sided (structure and the family's semantics). The mitigation is the promotion rule — semantic substance is transient in atlas, always headed for its own repo on crystallization, never a permanent runtime home.
• The PR-title prefix set in CLAUDE.md (topology · diagrams · workflow · adr · cli · CI · docs) gains theory; atlas doctor should learn the new area exists (it ships nothing to export, so it is exempt from docs lint).
• These are proposals, not ratifications: the theory candidates remain candidates, gated by 0013 and the tests above. No repos are created by this ADR.
• The genre precedent in arche (research-docs/, docs/rfcs/) stays where it is — it is arche-scoped architectural reasoning; only the family-scoped constitution moves here.