When a convention becomes a promise.
The architecture · Structure 3 / 5
Every serious system accumulates conventions. The question is whether a convention stays a habit that erodes when the people change, or becomes a contract that a stranger can rely on. Unifyhub is built on the second answer, and this page describes the machinery that makes it hold.
What a governed contract carries
Rules
The normative statements, written with explicit authority, that say what must be true. Rules are short, testable, and numbered so they can be cited in a review or an argument.
Standards
The reasoning and the recommended practice: why the rule exists, what it costs, how to satisfy it well. Standards are where judgment lives, which is why they are separate from the rules they explain.
Validation
The executable check. A contract whose conformance depends on a careful reader is a contract that will be broken quietly, so the check is automated and runs in the path a change has to pass.
A change process
A public way to propose, debate, and adopt a change to the contract itself, with the outcome recorded. Ecosystem-level change that arrives without warning is how communities learn they were tenants.
Where the contract lives
Documentation is treated as the source of truth for behavior rather than as a description of it, kept next to the thing it governs and versioned with the same discipline as code. When the document and the implementation disagree, that is a defect with an owner, not a note for later.
Inheritance rather than repetition
Contracts extend one another. A baseline says what is true of everything, and a specialized contract adds only what its domain requires. Restating an inherited rule is discouraged, because two copies of a rule become two versions of it as soon as one is updated.
Promotion and deprecation
Promotion
When an interface becomes shared operational language between people, tools, and agents, it stops being an implementation detail and is promoted into a versioned contract with compatibility rules. Recognizing that moment on time is one of the harder judgments in the system.
Deprecation
Removing a contract is an operation with a schedule, a migration path, and a stated end, carried out even when the only known consumers are internal. A deprecation policy that bends for convenience teaches everyone that the guarantees are decorative.
Why this is the anti-capture mechanism
Capture rarely arrives as a decision to trap anyone. It arrives as a series of small, reasonable moments where a private detail was easier than a public contract. Governance is the standing answer to those moments, and it is why compatibility comes before capture is written as a rule instead of an intention.