The Portable Moves

The portable moves

Strip away DocAble, the companion repository, and the current generation of agent harnesses, and a small set of moves remains. These are the parts of the method meant to port.

Five such moves remain, and each can transfer to a system with different tools, a different harness, and different names.

Choose the reduction that makes the engineering question answerable without carrying unnecessary detail. Do not model the whole system because a model sounds sophisticated. Identify the recurring question, externalize enough structure to answer it without reconstructing the implementation, and stop when additional detail no longer pays.

Place authority at the earliest boundary where the obligation is legible and enforceable. Guidance can aim an agent before that point; local controls can sometimes act without a rich system model. Give an obligation authority only where the environment has the semantics and evidence needed to decide it.

Audit → Drain → Promote when introducing a future authoritative obligation into an inherited estate. A rule worth enforcing tomorrow may be violated everywhere today. Observe first, repair the inherited findings under evidence, then grant the mechanism authority once the estate can satisfy the rule without breaking work in flight. The final authority mechanism may be the original detector or a narrower mechanism revealed by the drain.

Generate evidence capable of falsifying the claim. For consequential work, do not rely on the producing agent's report alone. Choose an oracle appropriate to the obligation, search beyond the examples already known, and ask whether the search actually reached the semantic region the claim covers. Size delegated work so its result forms a meaningful unit of evidence.

Convert recurring judgment into durable engineering structure when the expected future return justifies the upkeep. A repeated reconstruction may earn a model; a repeated review may earn a validator; a repeated unsafe action may earn a constraint; a repeated procedure may earn a skill or runbook. Useful structure becomes engineering capital when later work benefits from inheriting it; maintain that capital while it pays and retire assets whose carrying cost exceeds their return.

These moves are written for the engineer to apply. They can also be represented: a mastery-skill can externalize the situations that trigger each move, the alternatives available in each, and the criteria that select among them — the method turned into something an agent reads and reasons through rather than a habit a person carries. Appendix E shows this concretely in self-governance, which builds exactly this representation of the method from the skill recipe.

Those five moves are MAGE without its case. Appendix D collects them as bench procedures. Part V turns from method to evidence: what happened when this cycle met a system being built faster than its engineered environment could initially absorb.