0004: Ownership And Rehearsal Fail Closed

Status: Accepted for STAGE 0.3

Context

Game repositories mix human-authored content, imported media, vendored tools, generated outputs, runtime objects, caches, and legacy material. Editors and compilers may also mutate a source tree during nominally read-only inspection.

Decision

Ownership authority uses explicit categories: human, project-generated, external-generated, external-vendored, runtime, legacy, or unresolved. Unresolved authority names a decision owner and prohibited operations; agents must not guess that a path is safe to rewrite or delete.

External studies use a formal source snapshot for evidence and a disposable rehearsal copy for mutation-prone tools. Pre/post source-state comparison is a required read-only claim.

Consequences

• “Generated” is no longer one undifferentiated category.
• Cache creation cannot silently invalidate a read-only audit.
• Uncertainty produces a bounded stop condition rather than an ownership guess.