Human Index

Tier: 1 · Normative weight: supports TM-OBS-004 Requires: Typed Current Projection

Problem it removes

Once current state lives in a TOML file, people stop reading it — and start maintaining a parallel prose account that drifts. The machine answer and the human answer part company, and each reader trusts whichever they saw first.

Mechanism

A markdown index — typically the README of the directory the projection describes — that names every record the projection declares, with a short status marker per row that parallels each document’s status line. It is a rendering of the projection, not a second source: TM-OBS-004 requires machine and human forms to resolve to the same declared meaning, and this pattern is the cheap way to have a human form at all. The projection declares the index’s path (human_index) and the exact markers expected, which is what lets a governed read assert the agreement instead of trusting it.

Cost

Authoring: an hour, mostly table layout. Per change: one table row edited alongside each projection edit — the duplication is deliberate, because it is checked. Per session: negative; it is the page people actually consult.

Do not adopt when

The projection is small enough to read directly and no one but its maintainer ever asks the question.

Evidence

Assessed in inference-ops and cloud-ops (deployment READMEs); the kinra-corpus index is the same pattern over organizational records.

Template

None — adopted by convention; the projection template’s human_index field names it.

Related patterns

Governed Read turns the index-versus-projection agreement from discipline into a check.