Truth Machine / Kit

Status Lines

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

Read as Markdown

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:

**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).

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 and cloud-ops, where the governed read asserts status lines against the current projection.

Template

templates/status-lines/vocabulary.md

Typed Current Projection declares which document should carry CURRENT, making the marker checkable. Frozen Archive is where fully retired material goes.