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ADR-0009: Asymmetric amendment — tightening needs quorum, loosening needs the human
| field | value |
|---|---|
| Status | Accepted |
| Date | 2026-07-23 |
| Register | factory (docs/adr, 4-digit ids) |
| Source | docs/adr/0009-asymmetric-amendment-tighten-quorum-loosen-human.md — permalink at bdafa201a (unchanged on master since that commit) |
| Wiki register entry | ADR-0009 (wiki status: Accepted) |
The record
- Status: Accepted
- Date: 2026-07-23
- Spec: SPEC-033 §1
Context
The design lets the legislature (Fable + Opus, quorum = 2) amend the rulebase when a build hits a wall that is genuinely a design gap. That creates a structural incentive problem: when a gate blocks progress, the cheapest correct-looking fix is an amendment that widens the gate.
Both voters are models, and one of them (Fable) is obedience-biased toward finding a way to proceed. Each individual loosening is quorum-blessed and ADR-papered, so the erosion is invisible step by step. The expected long-run behaviour is monotone gate-loosening — the governance equivalent of ratcheting down a test suite until it passes.
Decision
Amendments are asymmetric:
- Tightening (the amended rulebase accepts strictly less) — quorum = 2 suffices.
- Loosening (anything that newly accepts) — requires human ratification.
Direction is never self-declared by the amending quorum; it is decided by a classifier (ADR-0020).
Alternatives rejected
- Symmetric quorum for all amendments — the erosion path above.
- Human ratification for every amendment — makes routine tightening a human event and destroys the autonomy thesis for no safety gain (tightening cannot widen the contract).
- Rate-limiting amendments — throttles the symptom, not the direction; a slow erosion is still erosion.
Consequences
- Creates a genuine anti-drift ratchet: the rulebase can only get stricter without human consent.
- Creates a real liveness tension: structural gates are false-positive-prone, and every false-positive's correct fix is a loosening — now routed to a scarce human. Mitigated by the edge budget and tiered loosening (ADR-0021); the tension is real and deliberately accepted, not denied.
- Requires the Constitution to be an explicit, enumerated, tested artifact — otherwise "what counts as widening" has no stable referent.
Provenance
Round-2 Opus identified the bootstrapping incentive ("opus writes the rules it is governed by") and proposed the asymmetry. Round-3 refined the classifier (ADR-0020) and the liveness mitigation (ADR-0021) after Opus showed the rule, unmitigated, makes routine coupling changes human events.
Related ADRs
Rulings cited
None.