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. Identify the checkpoint where the contract requires the proposed result; a permitted pending state does not establish a gap. Check whether the result is determined by the information available to the responsible production path there. Seek two legal underlying histories that give the path the same initial state and inputs through that checkpoint but require incompatible public observations. If they exist, name the missing information or provider obligation. A candidate law may be scoped explicitly; do not silently narrow an accepted promise, which requires authority to revise.
6. Describe the smallest independent model that enacts the obligation and limits from step 1 and makes the rival and boundary predictions from steps 3–4. Retain the source facts needed to examine any information gap from step 5, even when the production path has not received them. For any proposed merge of model states, ask whether a legal next action can distinguish them. Map model abstractions to the project vocabulary.

The information check concerns what production can receive. The test of model state concerns what the reference must remember. A model may know a source row that the production path has never received. For example, suppose a path must publish a full top-ten result after a deletion but receives only the old top ten and the deletion. If it cannot receive replacement rows before publication, two source datasets can require incompatible results while the path sees the same inputs. A live query can request replacement rows with loadSubset. If the provider supplies them through Collection sync writes that apply before publication, that path has the needed information; judge it at its own promised publication checkpoint.

Return: the candidate law and status, its source, rival predictions, a concrete distinguishing witness, and the next experiment or unresolved decision. For an information gap, include the indistinguishable histories and the unresolved source, protocol, or scope 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? If an information gap is claimed, try a nearby path that supplies the missing input, such as a provider backfill. Check whether that input distinguishes the histories before the checkpoint; if it does, the original impossibility argument no longer applies to that path.

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.