0010: Workflow-level domain boundaries

Status: accepted Date: 2026-07-14

Context

The workflow reframing exposed several nodes whose homes or names were inherited from skill packaging rather than their structural moves. A corpus review had also recorded contradictions around Progressive Disclosure, Persistence, promotion authority, the human gate, and the overloaded word "hoist."

Decision

• Composition means decomposing a workflow into bounded responsibilities behind seams. A component may be deterministic code, an in-context module, a tool, or a child LLM execution. Recursive dispatch is one realization, not the definition.
• Progressive Disclosure belongs directly under Context Engineering. It combines deferral and distillation to create graded access; it does not compose workflow components.
• Constrained Generation remains separate from Externalization. Externalization freezes repeatable procedure outside the LLM; constrained generation keeps generation in the LLM while bounding its output space.
• Persistence receives a parent concept: stateless LLM workflows construct continuity through external artifacts. Configuration and durable state are its authorship/lifecycle branches.
• Fresh-context trials replace the thin "testing with subagents" framing. A child is an isolated test execution, not assumed to be a trustworthy grader; the parent owns fixtures, comparison, assertions, and iteration. The move supports both TDD and comparative trials.
• A human gate is a contracted control-flow seam, not an application of recursive LLM dispatch.
• The controlling workflow owns recovery. A checker supplies a defined verdict and evidence; it does not silently choose retry, repair, degradation, escalation, or abandonment.
• In staged effects, sandbox-then-merge engineers isolation. Describe-then- execute keeps the generating worker pure and relocates the effect to a trusted executor; it is not itself the isolated class.
• Reserve hoist for moving stable procedure or judgment out of repeated LLM execution. Information transformation remains distillation.

Consequences

• Live nodes and the authoritative map adopt these homes and boundaries.
• Skill-specific examples may remain, but the node claims above them are framed at workflow level.
• Concrete compositional examples and their domains remain deferred until the spec corpus is complete.
• The final corpus title, Portfolio's workflow-level role, and the exact foundation-level relationship between the contract and recursive dispatch remain unresolved.