The foundational documents

Created before any prose, saved in the project repository, and read by agents rather than inferred by them.

Each has exactly one owner. A second document describing structure, voice or scope is drift, and the resolution is always to fold it back and delete it — never to keep both and remember which one is current.

Document	Path	Owns	Ships?
Brief as given	spec/brief.md	The original framing, unedited	No
Interview	spec/interview.md	The gaps, filled	No
Book spec	spec/spec.md	What it is, who for, scope, length	No
Style guide	guides/style-guide.md	Voice, register, prose conventions	No
Graphics style guide	guides/graphics-style-guide.md	Visual language	No
Outline	outline/outline.md	Arc, chapter map, boundaries, order	No
Chapter briefs	outline/briefs/<id>.md	One chapter's contract	No
Continuity ledger	continuity.md	What has been established, and where	No
Manifest	book.toml	Structure, status, continuity keys	No

Nothing on this list appears in the printed book. They are production apparatus.

The outline never ships

Stated explicitly because the drift is natural and common: an outline becomes a preface, then a "how to read this book" chapter, then chapter zero.

It exists purely to guide the writing agents and any human co-author. A reader does not want the plan; a reader wants the book. The one legitimate descendant of an outline in a finished reference work is a table of contents, which is generated from the manifest.

The chapter brief is the load-bearing document

A brief is what a writer gets instead of the rest of the book. Everything that would otherwise come from reading adjacent chapters has to be in it:

Section	Replaces
Argument	Knowing what this chapter is for
What the reader can do afterwards	Knowing where it lands
Assumed by this point	Having read the earlier chapters
Establishes	Knowing what later chapters will lean on
Must cover	The plan
Must not cover	Noticing you are writing a neighbour's material
Sources	Having done the research
Neighbour summaries	Having read the chapters either side

"Must not cover" is the section people leave out and the one that prevents the overlap which shows up as repetition in the assembled manuscript.

If briefs are thin, writers compensate by reading — and the architecture collapses back into one large context, quietly, without anything failing.

The continuity ledger

The book's memory: every term, claim, running example and promise it has established, with the chapter that established it.

It is the mechanism by which chapter twelve knows what chapter three said without chapter twelve's writer having read chapter three. Four kinds of entry earn their place:

• Terms — so nothing is defined twice, differently
• Claims — positions taken, which later chapters may build on but not re-argue
• Running examples — with their details fixed, so two chapters do not give the same example different numbers
• Promises — "we return to this in chapter nine" needs a chapter nine that does, or the promise gets cut

A fifth section records deliberate repetition, because a reference work sometimes should restate itself for readers who open it in the middle. Recording those decisions is what stops the continuity pass from "fixing" them.

The manifest's establishes / requires keys are the machine-checkable shadow of this document: a chapter may only require what an earlier chapter establishes, and the linter enforces the ordering.

Why the brief is kept unedited

The first statement of what someone wants is evidence. Once paraphrased into a spec, the original framing — what was emphasised, what was assumed, what was left out — is unrecoverable.

It also makes the spec auditable. Anything in the spec that cannot be traced back to the brief is an addition, and additions should be visible as additions rather than passing as the user's own requirements.