Change log

One file, or one page of a notebook, where each entry holds the date, the old wording, the new wording, and why it changed.

Nothing grander than that. Before each change to a charter, the old text is copied into the log with its reason, and then the change is made by the person's own hand. The log is kept in plain text they own, dated, beside the charter it belongs to.

It is load-bearing because it is what makes a change reversible and legible. Six weeks after an edit, nobody remembers what the line used to say or what it was answering; with the old wording in hand you can put it back in a minute, and with the reason in hand you can tell whether the reason still holds. A change without its why cannot be judged later, only obeyed or resented.

A Player+ uses the log as the memory of the improvement rhythm: the daily misses go in the improvement log, and the resulting edits go here with their before-and-after. When a house takes an update from a shared kit, that too goes in the log — what was taken, what was declined, and why — because a house is sovereign and its divergences are worth as much as its adoptions.

It is also how provenance is kept honest at the smallest scale. A wording carried from somewhere else is logged as carried, with where it came from, so that the next person reading the charter can tell what the house decided from what it inherited.

Also called: change logs Stands on: Charter · Agent engineering · Provenance Opens onto: Hypothesize · Soak · Prune · Improvement log · Lineage · Decision Records In play: beyond Sources: Player+ Modules, Agent Engineering, Advanced Agent Engineering, The Agent Improvement Process · The DNA of Heaven, Parts VII and XIII ("Version it; keep every prior version"). Open: none found.