gate-house/history/2026-09-01-authority-plane-blueprint-retirement.md

Authority-plane Blueprint retirement

Repository: gate-house Project family: NetKingdom Status: Design history; non-normative Date: 2026-09-01 Decision: decisions/decisions.md GH-DEC-2026-001 Workplan: GH-WP-0001-T05

Purpose

This note records the retirement of ArchitectureBlueprint.md v0.1 and the disposition of its sections. It prevents withdrawn engine design from remaining in the working architecture while preserving the original argument and text.

The complete pre-revision document is recoverable without copying 2,500 lines of obsolete direction into current documentation:

git show 75ce372:ArchitectureBlueprint.md

Commit 75ce372 is the T04 completion and contains the last complete v0.1 Blueprint before T05 began.

Why it was retired

Version 0.1 described Gate House as a deterministic authority plane with an /authorize API, policy evaluation, grants, revocation, storage, deployment, and operational targets. GH-DEC-2026-001 rejected that placement: Gate House is non-deterministic Staff, while access-engine is the only policy decision point.

Building the old design in this repository would have violated the doctrine's first boundary in its own home: cognition would have acquired a path to privilege.

Section disposition

v0.1 section	Disposition in v0.2
§1–4 purpose, goals, non-goals, context	Rewritten around a Staff-layer doctrine artifact and the estate responsibility boundary.
§5 three-plane model	Replaced by the accepted Taxonomy → Tooling → Engines → Staff layer model. Gate House's former Authority Plane placement is withdrawn.
§6 core domain model	Retained and tightened in v0.2 §3. Runtime-owned grant and decision terms are explicitly attributed to access-engine.
§7 canonical authorization request	Replaced by docs/contracts/authority-context.md; no Gate House wire format or endpoint.
§8–9 canonical decision and decision types	Decision vocabulary retained; schema and emission belong to access-engine.
§10–13 components, policy architecture, evaluation order	Withdrawn as access-engine implementation design. The monotonic-restriction invariant survives without prescribing an algorithm.
§14–15 Assistant and Autonomous modes	Retained as security regimes in v0.2 §5. Gate House is removed from runtime flows.
§16 King's Guard integration	Retained as the restrictive posture and containment contract in v0.2 §8.
§17 secrets/OpenBao integration	Retained as responsibility and credential-separation doctrine in v0.2 §9. Direct Gate House integration is withdrawn.
§18 execution gateway	Retained as a preference for trusted brokered execution, owned by the execution and credential repositories.
§19 MCP integration	Retained as capability-not-authority doctrine in v0.2 §10.
§20–21 change dynamics and circuit breakers	Retained as the Change Dynamics Envelope and independent stop-path obligations in v0.2 §11. Runtime mechanisms belong to Engines.
§22 multi-tenancy	Retained as explicit-scope doctrine in v0.2 §12.
§23 policy self-modification	Retained as independent-governance doctrine in v0.2 §12.
§24 audit architecture	Retained in v0.2 §13, corrected with the archive-completeness bound and per-source emission ownership. Gate House as audit writer is withdrawn.
§25–26 storage and API	Withdrawn completely as Gate House runtime design.
§27 trust boundaries	Replaced by v0.2 §2. Gate House is outside the runtime trust path.
§28 failure modes	Retained as cross-component doctrine in v0.2 §14, with local-outbox revocation semantics from GH-DEC-2026-002.
§29 caching	Implementation ownership moved to consuming Engines; only the no-expansion-on-staleness rule survives.
§30–32 deployment, technology, repository layout	Withdrawn completely. Gate House is specification-only.
§33 end-to-end scenarios	Reconciled to INTENT's UC-01…UC-05 and referenced by v0.2 §16.
§34 security test program	Reconciled to the Canon's T-01…T-10. Gate House specifies; whitehat-security executes.
§35–38 performance, availability, observability, admin UI	Withdrawn as service requirements. Cross-estate evidence and failure obligations survive without Gate House SLOs or interfaces.
§39 governance integration	Mandate model retained as a logical governance shape in v0.2 §6, not a Gate House database schema.
§40 ADR backlog	Reclassified in v0.2 §17. ADR-003 lapsed; Engine implementation choices moved to their owning repositories.
§41 prototype milestones	M0, M3, and M4 lapsed. Remaining concerns are doctrine, owning-repository work, or assurance targets rather than Gate House implementation milestones.
§42 longer-term evolution	Replaced by INTENT success criteria and the conformance loop.
§43 invariants	Stable A-01…A-15 identifiers retained and corrected for ownership in v0.2 §15.
§44 summary	Replaced: Gate House establishes doctrine and no longer appears in the request path.

What retirement means

The v0.1 text remains useful evidence of why the boundary was redrawn. It is not an implementation backlog. Citations to it must identify it as historical; new architecture and workplans cite v0.2, the authority-context contract, the Canon, or the governing decision.