zone-engine/GOAL.md

repo	repo_flavor	project_status	started
zone-engine	project	active	2026-08-19

Goal — zone-engine

Outcome

Enforcement rigidity is a declared, reviewable property of a named zone rather than a boolean per repo. A control can be turned on for the band of the estate that wants its failure mode, and left advisory where that failure mode would stop the work. Deep refactors get relaxed rigidity through an exception that expires on its own.

Invariants

• flex-auth remains the only policy decision point. zone-engine is authority over zone identity and membership; the effect of a zone on any decision flex-auth renders is expressed in a flex-auth policy package.

  The first draft of this invariant said "nothing this repo builds sits synchronously in a decision path". flex-auth rejected that on review: it is a latency guarantee, not an authority one. Compiled data that determines an outcome is still deciding — it just decided earlier. Under the old wording zone-engine could compile enforced: false for a lane, flip warden sign from deny to allow with no flex-auth policy change, and be literally compliant. Membership is ours; stance is theirs.

• Compiled, not queried. Membership reaches flex-auth by compilation into the registry it already loads. This is a consequence of the invariant above, not the invariant itself — flex-auth is service_class: latency-critical and loads its registry once at process start.

• A zone that can be quietly widened is not a boundary. Every change of stance is observable, and every exception has an enforced expiry.

• Accuracy, not altitude (tenancy-posture_v0.1 §6). A repo declaring a stricter zone than it can evidence is the failure to design against, because it looks like progress.

• Placement is not posture. Reefs are a separate axis and stay separate.

• The model precedes the schema. No API, no storage, no wire format until ZONE-WP-0001 has partitioned the real estate.

Success gates

1. The model partitions today's estate — the 27 ops-warden catalog lanes, the actor inventory, the posture-carrying workloads — without a residue of unexplained exceptions.
2. A canon standard is drafted and offered to net-kingdom, in the family of tenancy-posture_v0.1.
3. At least two repos declare zones and are read by a third — a model only its author honours is not adopted.
4. ops-warden's policy.enabled is retired in favour of a zone-aware control, closing WARDEN-WP-0031-T05.
5. Whether a runtime is needed is answered on evidence from the exception lifecycle, not assumed.

Project retirement

Archive when the standard is canon, the declarations are live, and either a runtime exists with an owner or the decision that none is needed is recorded.

ZONE-WP-0002 is the final reference-contract hardening and retirement pass. It does not reopen the no-runtime decision; it makes the retained artifacts truthful enough for an explicit archive-or-maintain decision.