belief-currency-is-actively-managed
OUT derived (depth 3)
The system actively manages belief currency bidirectionally: the production-ready derive pipeline safely introduces new beliefs through defensive validation, while the staleness CI gate detects drift in existing beliefs against source material — together preventing both unsafe additions and undetected obsolescence.
Summary
The system has two complementary mechanisms for keeping its knowledge base healthy: one that safely adds new derived knowledge through careful validation, and another that catches when existing knowledge has gone stale relative to its sources. Together, they form a complete lifecycle for managing what the system knows. However, this claim is currently unsupported because at least one of its foundations — either the reliability of the derive pipeline or the completeness of the staleness detector — no longer holds.
Justifications
SL — New-belief derivation plus existing-belief drift detection yields bidirectional currency assurance
Antecedents (all must be IN):
- derive-pipeline-is-production-ready — The derive pipeline correctly allocates budgets, validates proposals defensively, and produces well-formed beliefs through a round-trippable prompt contract.
- staleness-gate-catches-all-drift — The staleness CI gate detects all forms of source material drift without false negatives.
Unless (any of these IN defeats this justification):
- derive-agent-count-bug — `_build_beliefs_section` has a bug: `count += len(belief_ids)` is inside the per-belief loop instead of outside it, inflating the count and shrinking the non-agent budget below intended size
- missing-source-file-is-silent — If a node's source file no longer exists on disk, `check_stale` silently skips it; callers cannot distinguish "file deleted" from "file never tracked."
- hash-truncation-is-16-hex — Source hashes are SHA-256 truncated to the first 16 hex characters (64 bits), reducing collision resistance to ~32 bits for birthday attacks compared to the full 256-bit hash.
Dependents
These beliefs depend on this one:
- complete-system-is-self-correcting — The system actively maintains its own consistency along two independent dimensions: the TMS core handles exceptional conditions (contradictions trigger deterministic resolution, propagation respects lifecycle state), while belief currency management detects and surfaces drift in source material — no inconsistency persists undetected or unresolved.
- external-beliefs-are-safe-and-current — External beliefs are managed end-to-end across their complete lifecycle with no gap between ingestion safety and ongoing maintenance: defensively contained at ingestion through layered validation, correctly lifecycle-managed through import reconciliation and staleness checking, and actively tracked for currency — no external belief enters unvalidated, drifts undetected, or persists without lifecycle oversight.
- resource-management-supports-belief-currency — Active belief currency management — sustainable derivation of new beliefs and staleness detection for existing ones — operates with accurate bidirectional token budget control, ensuring derivation rounds allocate resources correctly per agent and output fits context-limited consumer constraints.
- self-correction-spans-creation-and-maintenance — The system self-corrects along both temporal axes: it detects and resolves active contradictions through lifecycle-safe backtracking at derivation time, and it detects and flags source material drift through conservative staleness checking over a belief's lifetime — ensuring beliefs are correct both when first derived and as their evidential basis evolves.