0001 — The Codices are the supreme authority of the project
A recorded institutional decision, with reasoning and result.
- Authority rank
- 5
- Version
- v1.0
- Adopted
- unrecorded
- Held by
- Stewardship Office
- System
- SYS-10
Source · docs/codices/DECISIONS/0001-codices-as-supreme-authority.md · registered by rule
- Date: 2026-07-31
- Status: Accepted
- Supersedes: nothing
Context
Anabasis had a published Charter (eight Books, rendered at /charter) expressing its public voice, and one deeply built division (the Academy). There was no machine-readable doctrine an implementer — human or agent — was required to obey before making architectural decisions. Context was carried in conversation and lost between sessions, which is the principal failure mode of AI-assisted development over long horizons.
Decision
Establish docs/codices/ as the constitutional and architectural source of truth for the project, with the authority order defined in docs/codices/README.md: Constitution, then Master Blueprint, then domain Codices, then decision records, then the Charter, then implementation code.
Codex 0 is the institutional map: divisions, offices, user types, engines, workflows, data model, permissions, dashboards, agents, API boundaries, tooling, revenue, reporting, and expansion points. Every future feature must map back to it.
AGENTS.md binds implementers to the Codices. Project memory carries the compressed doctrine so no session begins uninformed.
Alternatives considered
- Extend the Charter instead. Rejected: the Charter is public editorial voice; constitutional and architectural doctrine needs a different register, a different audience, and an amendment procedure.
- Keep doctrine in prompts only. Rejected: prompts are not version-controlled, reviewable, or amendable, and they are lost between sessions.
- Encode doctrine as TypeScript data. Rejected for now: doctrine must outlive the framework. Markdown is inert to the build and readable in fifty years. A published reading surface can be generated from it later.
Consequences
- No new architecture is proposed without checking Codex 0 first.
- Conflicts between requests and doctrine are surfaced, not silently resolved.
- Every future architectural decision is recorded here rather than lost.
- Doctrine drift becomes visible: the Charter and the Codices must be reconciled when either changes.