Principles · Overview

Governing Principles

Governing Principles for Complex Engineering Projects

The Governing Principles are the authoritative principles that define the governing model of the Framework for Keeping Complex Work Coherent Across Time. The Normative Structural Specification puts them into practice.

Principles

  1. 01 Component-Oriented Decomposition AI Agents working on complex long-horizon projects require stable, bounded units of work with explicit Contracts. They get that through Hierarchical Component Specifications, and not through flat lists of features or a monolithic requirements document.
  2. 02 Layered System Architecture AI Agents working on complex long-horizon projects need a stable source of truth. They operate by reading Specifications, code, and Designs, then proposing or making changes. When essential purpose and critical Constraints are entangled with volatile implementation details, AI Agents must continually re-infer what must remain true. This increases inconsistency and error.
  3. 03 Integrated Modularity First For complex, long-horizon Systems, prefer a coherent design with strong internal Component boundaries over early hard separation.
  4. 04 Verification-First Engineering No unit of work is done until it has been verified against explicit Acceptance Criteria and corrected until those criteria are met. Every meaningful artifact must have checkable criteria before it is accepted.
  5. 05 Specifications as Contracts Specifications that define required behaviors, interfaces, or Acceptance Criteria are Contracts, not suggestions.

Normative Structural Specification #

The Normative Structural Specification is written in full in Normative Structural Specification. That file is the authoritative structural document of the Framework for Keeping Complex Work Coherent Across Time.

The Specification defines the required project artifacts (VISION, Governing Principles, the Component Specification Graph, Interface Declarations, Decision Records, Verification Artifacts, Baselines, Registers, and the Work Record) together with their layout, their content rules, and the deterministic checks that enforce them. It operationalizes the five principles above: every clause is traceable to one or more of the 79 Adopted structural forms in research/project-structure-patterns/Generalized Patterns.md or to a frozen principle.

In any conflict over project structure, the Normative Structural Specification governs.