Abstract

This publication discloses, with enabling detail, a fail-closed governance gate that is invoked at every path capable of creating, registering, or enabling a governed unit of work — a new application, a new game, or a large ("big-task") change. The gate refuses to let creation proceed unless a mandated set of governance artifacts (an idea brief, a purpose statement, a design, a cost model, an implementation plan, a deployment runbook, and a live tracker) is proven to exist. The novelty is not "check that files exist." It is how presence is resolved. A mandated artifact may live in any one of several heterogeneous evidence stores: a filesystem directory, an in-flight builder-supplied file map (content not yet written to disk), and several database applications — an idea/innovation store, a documents store, and a spreadsheet store — each with its own schema and its own free-form naming. The gate probes all stores, canonicalizes each store's artifact-type hints to a common vocabulary, and takes the UNION of the per-store present-sets. An artifact is satisfied if it is non-empty in any store. Crucially, every probe is read-only and soft-fails to the empty set. An unreachable or erroring store therefore contributes no evidence, which can only shrink the union. The gate is biased toward REJECT and can never "assume present" during a partial outage. We call this reject-biased union resolution and prove it gives monotone availability semantics: degrading availability can only make the gate stricter, never more permissive. Zero-byte stubs do not count as present; all creation paths funnel through one chokepoint; the only bypass is an audited break-glass; and a rejection returns a typed error carrying the exact missing set, enabling an autonomous agent to self-remediate. This document is offered as public prior art to bar patent claims over the mechanism.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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