Generated Artifacts

Tier: 4 · Normative weight: supports TM-PUB-002, TM-OBS-003 Requires: nothing

Problem it removes

Published forms — rendered docs, manifests, AI context files — get edited directly, and the canonical source stops being canonical. Or they are regenerated on a machine with a different toolchain and silently differ from what review approved.

Mechanism

One generator, deliberately minimal in its dependencies, that builds every derived form from the canonical source: page markdown, bundled context, a manifest binding each artifact to its SHA-256, machine schemas. The generated tree is committed, and a --check mode rebuilds to a temporary result and compares byte-for-byte — drifted or hand-edited artifacts fail the check rather than shipping (the checking read repairs nothing, per TM-OBS-003). The manifest’s digests are what a downstream consumer verifies against, and its source revision is what a publication freeze later binds (TM-PUB-002).

A pre-commit gate that runs the check turns “never edit generated files” from a reminder into a mechanism.

Cost

Authoring: days for a real generator — the largest build cost in the catalog, paid once. Per change: regeneration is one command, enforced by the gate. Per session: none.

Do not adopt when

Nothing is derived: the source is the published form. Adopt the smallest piece that applies — a manifest with digests is valuable even when the “generator” is a copy step.

Evidence

This repository’s own build_publication.py and pre-commit gate are the assessed mechanism (see the publication contract); the kinra-site renderer’s snapshot check extends the same digest chain to the served site. Observed in kinra-site.

Template

None — generators are repository-specific; this repository’s manifest.json shows the output contract.

Related patterns

Publication Freeze records which generated artifact actually shipped.