# Status Lines

> A controlled vocabulary of bolded, dated status lines that make any stateful document declare whether it is current, preserved, or retired.

**Tier:** 0 · **Normative weight:** ergonomics
**Requires:** nothing

## Problem it removes

A repository accumulates documents whose commands still work but whose
claims are historical. Without a marker, every reader must infer from
context whether a profile, runbook, or measurement is active — and a
confident-looking stale document is exactly the one that gets acted on.

## Mechanism

The bolded first line after every stateful document's H1 carries a leading
controlled term, a role qualifier, and a dated verb clause:

```markdown
**Status: CURRENT production deployment.** Observed 2026-01-01 12:00 UTC
after <the observation that supports the claim>.
```

The vocabulary is small and closed — **CURRENT**, **PRESERVED**,
**VALIDATED**, **PARKED**, **RETIRED** — with two operating rules: check
the status line before treating any document as active, and never rewrite
preserved measurements — displacement changes only the status line and adds
a dated clause. When an index lists the documents, it carries a shorter
parallel marker, which a machine check can hold in agreement with the
document (see [Governed Read](/docs/truth-machine/kit/governed-read/)).

## Cost

Authoring: minutes per document. Per change: one line edited at every real
state change — which is the point; the edit is the record. Per session:
none; the line is read where the document is read.

## Do not adopt when

Documents in the repository have no lifecycle — nothing is ever displaced,
so every status line would read CURRENT forever.

## Evidence

Assessed in [inference-ops](/docs/truth-machine/implementations/inference-ops/)
and [cloud-ops](/docs/truth-machine/implementations/cloud-ops/), where the
governed read asserts status lines against the current projection.

## Template

[`templates/status-lines/vocabulary.md`](/docs/truth-machine/templates/status-lines/vocabulary.md)

## Related patterns

[Typed Current Projection](/docs/truth-machine/kit/current-projection/)
declares which document should carry CURRENT, making the marker checkable.
[Frozen Archive](/docs/truth-machine/kit/frozen-archive/) is where fully
retired material goes.