Summary

1. Enforcement is what makes an obligation more than a request. Guidance can influence a reasoner; enforcement determines what the engineered environment will permit or accept.
2. Place the mechanism where the obligation becomes decidable. Constraints act before work proceeds; sensors produce evidence; validators evaluate evidence; gates control admission. Prefer the earliest boundary where the environment has enough meaning and evidence to decide the obligation adequately.
3. Correspondence is not correctness. Models, implementations, and evidence can agree while being wrong together. Independent obligations and evidence are needed to distinguish faithful realization from mutually consistent error.
4. Convert recurring judgment into durable structure. When failures or repeated engineering decisions reveal knowledge future work should inherit, encode that knowledge into models, mechanisms, architecture, procedures, or evidence. When later work benefits from that structure, it becomes engineering capital.
5. Govern the governance machinery. Constraints, sensors, validators, and gates form an engineering system of their own. Their coverage, correspondence, cost, effects, and failure modes must themselves be understood and controlled.

Alignment principle

Make engineering obligations enforceable by encoding them into mechanisms that constrain actions, produce evidence, evaluate that evidence, and control admission.