Law discovery#

Use when: a bug, example, or implementation exists but the promised behavior is unclear; several supplied reports may share a law; or an existing law might conflate distinct obligations.

Inputs: the question, contract sources, known examples, existing oracle owner and limits, and the public observation that matters. A missing authority is an input gap, not permission to infer a promise from production.

With several supplied reports or examples, ask whether one caller-visible obligation predicts their different symptoms. Name its common preconditions, check an apparent outlier and a nearby case it should permit, and split the proposal if those cases require different promises. A descriptive cluster is a lead, not evidence that one contract governs every item.

Operation#

1. State the obligation in domain terms before describing machinery: for which legal inputs or histories, under which preconditions, what must be observable at which checkpoint? Include what can still be pending or unspecified.
2. Trace its authority. Separate accepted contract, observed current behavior, mathematical consequence, and proposed design. Explain why the obligation matters to a caller. A mathematical rule still needs an argument that it is the right rule for this API.
3. Form a plausible rival interpretation. Derive both predictions for the smallest legal case that separates them, without consulting production for the expected answer. If authority does not select a prediction, retain the design question instead of turning one guess into an assertion.
4. Compare an ordinary case with a nearby boundary case. Vary a relevant condition such as cardinality, ordering, identity, authority, or observation time. Keep other conditions fixed where possible. Check the boundary is within the claimed domain.
5. Describe the smallest independent model that can make those predictions. For any proposed merge of model states, ask whether a legal next action can distinguish them. Map model abstractions to the project vocabulary.

Return: the candidate law and status, its source, rival predictions, a concrete distinguishing witness, and the next experiment or unresolved decision. For a simple law, a short paragraph and a worked example suffice.

Control: try a legal alternative implementation. Does the proposed law reject it only because its scheduling or representation differs? Also try a plausible wrong result: could the proposed observation distinguish it?

Distortion: freezing an implementation accident into a law; treating a vivid edge case as representative; or overstating what is owed at an intermediate cut.

Stop when: the law is precise enough to enact independently, or a named missing authority or fact prevents choosing between predictions. Continue other authorized work while keeping that choice unresolved.

Adapted from Field Lab's assumption mapping and ground-condition probe.