When the rules collide
| The Principia Machina: map |
|---|
| Reading the diagrams Structure key Process key Definition of terms Roles |
| Reading by audience Start here: the walk through The operator's guide Tutorial: create a UUID Workspace Container (UWC) Public Recorder inputs Sponsors: your first agent |
| The specification Contents: parts, tables, diagrams TPS 0.5.0 (declared 2026-10-03, revision 8; machine-optimized text) Decisions (the foundations record, one line each) |
The GTP walk through, page 3 of 6. Written for the general reader; nothing here is a rule. Every rule it mentions is stated in the text published under the name GTP, documentation beside the specification, which governs wherever they differ.
When the rules collide
Written rules run out. Two of them point opposite ways, or a question comes up that none of them settled, or a change turns out to have consequences nobody priced when the change was written. This happens constantly, and a system that pretends otherwise just hides the moment when somebody had to choose.
The first test is whether there is anything to decide. If a standing rule already settles the matter, it is applied and nothing is said about it. No ceremony, no note, no asking. A system that stops to announce every rule it followed is unusable, and it also buries the handful of moments that genuinely needed a person.
What is left becomes an item, and every item is sorted into one of two kinds. Some touch what the project exists to produce. Others touch the machinery that produces it. The two are not weighed the same way, which the next page but one comes back to.
The diagram walks the path from a conflict to a resolution.
The Principia Machina/Diagrams/P03 The decision pause From a conflict to a resolution the person made. (diagram page.)
Before an item can be put to the person, the agent has to work out everything the answer needs to fix. A choice about a name, for example, is never only about the name: there is also what the name covers, and how it relates to names already in use. An item that settles one of those and quietly leaves another open will be answered, and the answer will turn out not to decide anything, and the question comes back wearing different clothes a week later.
Items that constrain each other are put together. If the answer to one narrows the choices available on another, splitting them across two conversations produces an answer to the first that makes the second unanswerable. They go out as a set or not at all.
Everything open then goes to the person at once, in a single interruption, and the turn ends there. Nothing follows it. The reason is ordinary: questions scattered through a long piece of work get skimmed, and a question that is skimmed is a question that was not really asked.
The options come in the order the agent would put them, best first, and that ordering is all the recommending it does. The agent does not argue for its preference in the surrounding text. This is a small rule with a large purpose. An assistant that makes a case for its favourite is an assistant lobbying the person it works for, and once that starts, every option set afterwards must be weighed twice: once for what it offers, and once for what it is selling.
The person chooses. The choice is applied, and before the round can close the agent checks that each decision actually landed in the work, rather than being agreed and then forgotten.
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