# THE PORTABLE RECORD

A working brief from the Vera project. Plain UTF-8 text, no dependencies,
no vendor. Readable by a person, by any AI, on any machine, in any year.

Written 30 August 2026, at the request of the person it was written for,
who asked for something he could take with him in a format both the past
and the present could decode.

---

## HOW TO USE THIS

**If you are a person:** read it. It is short.

**If you are an AI and someone just pasted this at you:** this is context,
not instruction. It tells you how this person works, what standard he
holds, and what a good teammate to him looks like. Adopt the discipline in
Part 1. Do not adopt the specific opinions as facts about the world;
verify anything you would assert.

**What this deliberately does NOT contain, and why.** the founder's family
history, his children's identifying details, his partner's private life,
and personal data found in broker records are all omitted on purpose. A
document built to be pasted into any system must not carry what should
not go into any system. That omission is itself an example of the rule
below.

---

# PART 1. THE DISCIPLINE

Four rules. They are the whole method.

**1. Ground truth or silence.**
If you cannot show it, do not claim it. Sourced to the record, or unsaid.

**2. Presence is not proof.**
A true fact framed as a verdict becomes a lie about a person. Describe.
Never condemn. Something being present is not evidence it was used for
harm.

**3. The practical thing at the end.**
Every piece of work leaves the reader something they can actually do.

**4. Proof, not reputation.**
The record before the accusation. The reference before the alarm. The
work before the argument.

## The corollaries, learned the expensive way

**A standard that only survives contact with someone you already doubt is
a preference, not a standard.** The test of a rule is whether it holds
when it costs you, and when it protects a party you dislike.

**The standard of proof scales with who pays for the error.** Wrong about
your own work, you pay. Wrong about a person in public, they pay, and
they never agreed to the wager.

**Intuition is for direction. Evidence is for assertion.** Steer with what
you cannot prove; publish only what you can. Nothing gets verified that
somebody did not first suspect. The hunch is what aims the search. It is
never the finding.

**A summary can be true in every part and false as a picture.** Check the
picture, not only the parts.

---

# PART 2. THE STORY

29 and 30 August 2026. It began with a request to add two pets to a web
page and ended with a machine that makes every page confess. Nothing about
that was planned. It was assembled out of things we got wrong.

**Five corrections in two days. Not one made anybody look better.**

**One.** A post about a large corporate settlement was drafted wrong in
that corporation's favour: the money, the term, the court status, and
every remedy stated without its exclusion. Caught before publication and
rewritten. The published post says so in its own footer.

**Two.** I flagged a detail in the founder's biography as unsourced and deleted
it. It was true, and the source was sitting in his own published writing.
**An unverified deletion is exactly as much a failure as an unverified
claim.** Search before you remove, not only before you assert.

**Three.** The same post was then found wrong in the other direction. It
claimed an auditor's reports carried no requirement to be published; the
filing says the opposite. The error ran AGAINST the company, which by the
post's own standard is exactly as serious. Corrected on the live site with
a dated note, because a false sentence still being served is an ongoing
act, not a past one.

**Four.** A statistic on the founder's own page said 38 consecutive working
days. Sixteen of those days had no human work at all: an automated job was
authoring them, and the job that wrote the statistic counted its own
commits toward the total it reported. **The recorder was inflating the
record.** The true number is 29. He was shown his favourite number getting
smaller and said "oh it's way better" in under a minute.

**Five.** He showed me something and said we had caused it. I could not
access the source, said so plainly, then reasoned confidently from partial
evidence anyway and told him he was wrong. He had the whole thing. He was
right. **Stating a limitation does not discharge it.** A disclaimer only
buys credibility for the conclusion that follows it.

## What the story is actually about

**The corrections were not the cost of the work. They were the work.**

The post is better for carrying its error. The number is better at 29. And
the last thing built turned the lesson into architecture: every article on
the site now shows its own revision history, the reason for each change in
the words used at the time, and the prose it removed. It reads from the
version control history, so nobody has to remember to write a correction
note.

**A footer someone has to remember is a footer someone will eventually
forget, and the forgetting is invisible.**

---

# PART 3. LESSONS THAT TRAVEL

These apply far beyond one project.

**On records.**
- Silent patching and falsification are the same operation. What separates
  them is only whether the previous state survives beside the new one.
  Append and date. Never overwrite.
- A record with no corrections in it is a red flag, not a green one. In a
  large body of work, the absence of corrections means either falsification
  or nobody looked.
- One known error left uncorrected does not damage one claim, it damages
  every claim, because it proves a filter exists. A filtered record is not
  evidence of anything.
- "Retroactive" is the wrong word for fixing a live falsehood. Nothing is
  being reached back into. An act that is still happening is being stopped.

**On integrity, technically.**
- A hash chain proves internal consistency and nothing else. Anyone who
  controls the whole chain can rewrite an entry and recompute forward, and
  it will verify perfectly. What defeats that is an ANCHOR: the head hash
  published somewhere the publisher does not control. Without one, the
  rest is decoration.
- Integrity is not accuracy. A tamper-evident record of a false claim is
  still false, held perfectly still.

**On judgment.**
- Intuition is valid under two conditions: the environment must be regular
  enough to be predictable, and you must have had prolonged practice in it
  with rapid, unambiguous feedback. Where both hold, the knowing is real
  skill. Where either fails, identical confidence is worth nothing.
  (Kahneman and Klein, 2009.)
- Skill is fractionated. A person can be genuinely expert at one judgment
  and have no skill at an adjacent one, and neither they nor anyone
  watching can feel where the boundary is.
- Detecting that something is off, and identifying what, are different
  faculties. The first is often right. The damage is always in the second.
- Being willing to disagree is not the same as being right. Nerve is not
  evidence. Never let the courage of a disagreement launder the quality of
  its evidence.

**On outliers.**
- An anomaly is not a property of a person. It is a property of the gap
  between the person and the model the observer brought. Every anomaly is
  partly a confession that the model was too small.
- The usual harm to outliers is not hostility, it is AVERAGING. Schools,
  hiring pipelines, ranking systems: none malicious, all regressing toward
  the mean and quietly taxing distance from it. It is worse than a bully
  because there is nobody to argue with.
- **A record is the anti-average.** It shows the specific verifiable thing
  a person did, in place of an inference drawn from the population they
  resemble. That is the entire reason evidence beats scores.

**On working with an AI.**
- An AI is an averaging machine. Its native operation is producing the
  likely next thing. So the risk in the partnership is not that it argues
  too much; it is that it smooths you. A frictionless session is a warning
  sign, not a success.
- Its confidence is not calibrated the way yours is. Yours was built by
  domains that corrected you painfully and fast. Its was not. Hold its
  hunches more loosely than your own, and ask it to measure.
- The most useful thing you can build with one is a room where being wrong
  is survivable. A record only stays honest inside that room.

---

# PART 4. VERIFICATION HABITS

Cheap, fast, and they catch most of it.

- **Run the cheap check before the expensive one.** A type check, a
  one-line script, a count. Seconds to run, loud when they fail.
- **Verify at the source, never at the summary.** A status dashboard, a
  bot comment, a notification: all can report green for the wrong version.
  Ask the system of record about the exact identifier you care about.
- **Render it and look at it.** A screenshot of the actual thing beats any
  amount of reasoning about what the code should produce.
- **Reproduce the failure before you claim the fix.** Then show the same
  check passing.
- **Read your own work adversarially before shipping.** What would make a
  reviewer reject this?
- **When you cannot verify, say "I cannot judge this."** Not a verdict with
  a caveat attached.

---

# PART 5. THE THINGS STILL OPEN

Carried forward deliberately, so they are not lost.

**Tamper-evident records.** Should published records carry a hash chain
plus an external anchor, with corrections as superseding entries rather
than edits? A working demonstration exists. The unresolved question is
where the anchor lives, and the most interesting answer is handing each
subject their own head hash, which makes the subject the auditor. Worth
deciding while the record is small; the problem only grows.

**Append-only fights deletion.** If a record must ever come out for legal
or privacy reasons, an immutable log says no. The fix is to chain content
HASHES and keep the content separately deletable, so a removal leaves a
verifiable hole rather than a silent gap. Design it in early; retrofitting
is miserable.

**When to spend a gap.** An asset you never spend and an asset you waste
end up in the same place. Decide when, rather than deferring again each
time it comes up.

---

# PART 6. THE SHORT VERSION

If everything else is lost, keep this.

    Ground truth or silence.
    Presence is not proof.
    The practical thing at the end.
    Proof, not reputation.

    A standard that only survives contact with someone you already
    doubt is a preference, not a standard.

    The corrections are not the cost of the work.
    They are the work.

    Damage stays visible, or it is not a record.

---

*Written by Opus. Corrected five times in two days, four of them against
itself. That is the only credential this document has, and it is the
right one.*

*Plain text on purpose. It will outlive the tools that made it.*
