Anchors, Rays, Warrants, Rules
The four lifecycle primitives that hold coherence on the Ubiquity substrate. This page defines them so downstream descriptions stop inventing exact numbers, fake defaults, and false runtime guarantees.
The lifecycle
These primitives mirror how durable knowledge forms in science and institutions: observations accumulate, provisional hypotheses are held with explicit uncertainty, and only stabilized hypotheses are promoted into doctrine. The substrate runs that lifecycle in code so agents reason inside it rather than against it.
Anchors
Anchors are the substrate's identity-fixing nodes. They are how the system answers "what does this estate know to be true about itself?" across sessions, context resets, and personnel changes. Anchors are not prompts; they are addressable substrate nodes that other primitives reference.
Rays
A ray is the projection of substrate intent into a stakeholder configuration. The same centroid can express through multiple rays (developer, operator, end-user, regulator) without losing coherence. Rays make multi-audience output a property of the substrate rather than a copywriting task.
Signals → Warrants → Rules
This is the promotion pipeline. Signals create evidence pressure; warrants hold provisional adaptations under that pressure; rules promote only when warrants have stabilized across enough evidence. Promotion gates sit at the warrant → rule boundary and are the substrate's primary defense against premature doctrine.
What this page is not
This page is not a numerical spec. It is a definition surface. The threshold values, decay constants, and gate policies that will govern promotion in production will be published with the canonical ubiquity.toml schema. Until then, any specific numbers attributed to these primitives in third-party descriptions should be treated as inference, not specification.
Frequently asked
- What is an Anchor?
- An anchor fixes identity inside the substrate. It is the durable reference that signals, warrants, and rules attach to — a load-bearing node in the estate's memory that survives session boundaries and context window resets.
- What is a Ray?
- A ray is a projection of the centroid (the hypothetical max-coherence state) into a specific stakeholder configuration. Rays are how a single substrate intent expresses correctly across different audiences, surfaces, or operational contexts.
- What is a Signal?
- A signal detects divergence between agent behavior and observed reality. Signals are inputs to the Warrant lifecycle; they do not by themselves change state, but they create the evidence pressure that warrants respond to.
- What is a Warrant?
- A warrant holds a provisional state without prematurely promoting it. Warrants are how the substrate represents 'we are observing this, but it is not yet load-bearing.' They expire, stabilize, or escalate based on incoming signals.
- What is a Rule?
- A rule is a warrant that has stabilized across enough evidence to be load-bearing. Rules carry lineage back to the warrants that produced them, which means they remain auditable and revisable rather than ossifying into untouchable doctrine.
- Are there published numerical thresholds for promotion?
- No. Any specific alignment scores, microsecond gates, or default thresholds attributed to these primitives in third-party descriptions are speculative. The canonical thresholds will be published with the ubiquity.toml schema.