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What engineering protocols are

Engineering protocols are the engineering domain built on Canon: engineering vocabulary and protocols such as software.change/1 and incident.response/1.

They state what makes engineering work legitimate: which claims must hold, which evidence counts and for which revision, which actions need authority, and which outcomes a case can end in.

Protocols are data​

Each protocol is a Canon protocol/1 document at protocols/<name>/<major>.yaml. Canon validates it, compiles it and evaluates it; engineering protocols add no hidden clock, network or model call. A protocol declares artifacts, evidence kinds, claims with the predicate that makes each true, obligations, actions with the authority they require, and the outcomes a case can end in.

What a claim, a piece of evidence or an obligation is, and how one is decided, belongs to Canon. This project owns the engineering vocabulary and the protocols written in it.

This project does not hold the live engineering record; that is AEP. It does not run agents; that is Commission and Loom. Every rule is pressure-tested against both software delivery and incident response: a rule that only makes sense for Git, pull requests or code is not necessarily a core rule of engineering protocols.

UNKNOWN is not FALSE​

A claim is TRUE, FALSE or UNKNOWN. Missing or stale evidence makes a claim UNKNOWN; it never makes it FALSE.

A stale revision​

A software change whose tests passed on revision R1 but whose implementation is now R2 has tests.pass = UNKNOWN, and merge stays blocked until evidence for R2 exists.

implementation = R2

Evidence:
  tests pass for R1

Claims:
  tests.pass = UNKNOWN

Actions:
  repository.merge = blocked

After tests.run on R2, tests.pass is TRUE and merge needs approval; after authority is granted, merge is admissible. Connecting a repository host never grants merge by itself.

Progress without a cause​

An incident can leave emergency mode while its cause is still UNKNOWN. After a rollback and fresh health evidence, service.healthy and impact.bounded are TRUE while cause.identified stays UNKNOWN: operational restoration and causal investigation progress independently.