PathruleKnowledge IR
Why Pathrule keeps the kind of each piece of knowledge, requirement, advice or context, alongside the text your team wrote, and how that authority survives all the way to the agent.
A rule is not a unit of knowledge. It is a container for one.
A single paragraph written by a person routinely says several different kinds of thing at once: that something must never happen, that something else has to be verified, and why the whole arrangement exists. Delivered as one blob, those collapse into "here is some text, please bear it in mind". Kept apart, they stay three different things with three different weights.
Knowledge IR is the name for that structured form: the kind and authority of each piece of knowledge, kept alongside the text your team wrote rather than instead of it.
Kinds of knowledge
Each piece of knowledge an agent receives is one of a few kinds, and the kind decides how it is presented.
What must not happen. A constraint a person set for a scope. It governs the paths it applies to and nothing else, and it is the only kind of knowledge the runtime can act on rather than merely mention.
What must be verified. A check that has to happen before the work counts as finished.
What worked when this problem occurred. A condition and the fix that resolved it. Advice: it tells an agent what has worked, not what it is forbidden to do.
What should be preferred under a condition. A preferred choice, with the alternatives it was preferred over. It states the preference and never forbids the alternative. Only a rule can do that.
How something should be done. An ordered procedure, with its steps in their original order, because a reordered procedure is a different procedure. Skills are where most procedures live.
What is true and useful here. A descriptive fact that changes the right approach without forbidding anything. That the database behind a module is a read-only replica is a fact of this kind, and it is why an agent should reach for the queue instead of an insert.
Why something works this way. The reasoning behind a decision. It exists because an agent that knows the rule but not the reason is one helpful refactor away from undoing it.
Authority bands
The kinds are not equal, and the delivery says so explicitly rather than relying on the order things appear in a prompt.
| Band | What it covers | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Requirement | Rules, including what must not happen and what must be verified | Binds. |
| Advice | Past fixes, preferred choices, procedures, rationale, agent findings, your personal preferences | Improves the work. |
| Context | Facts that inform the work | Informs. |
Nothing in the delivery path is allowed to present a lower band as able to override a higher one. Rules arrive in their own section. Agent findings arrive framed as advice to verify. Your personal preferences arrive under a heading that tells the agent the workspace's rules and required checks come first. A paragraph that reads at the same volume as a requirement is a paragraph that can be followed instead of it, and the structure exists to prevent exactly that.
This is what "authority is encoded, not flattened" means in practice, and it is the difference between a structured representation and a pile of sentences.
Documents and atoms
Your memories, rules and skills stay exactly what they are: the surface a person writes, edits and argues about. The structured form is a representation of them, not a replacement for them.
Rule document
|
+-- what must not happen
+-- what must be verified
+-- why
One document can hold several kinds of knowledge. That is normal, and it is the reason a container and a unit are not the same thing.
Where the binding kinds come from matters most. A requirement comes only from a rule a person set. A rule can also carry an executable constraint; a constraint an agent proposes is stored as a proposal and is not enforced until a person approves it. Nothing inferred by a model becomes a requirement on its own. See Proposed Knowledge.
Conflict
Two pieces of advice can both look valid and still disagree. Pathrule does not hand that disagreement to the agent to sort out.
- Findings. When two findings agents recorded about the code contradict each other, both are held back rather than one being guessed between.
- Preferences. When you teach a preference that contradicts an earlier one about the same kind of work, the newer one replaces it, and the older one is retired with a pointer to what replaced it.
- Rules and preferences. A rule always wins over a personal preference. See User Intelligence.
Two contradictory pieces of advice are worse than none, and the structure is what lets Pathrule tell when that is happening.