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Cool Idea: consolidate the design-doc corpus into a cited Echo Tome #535

@flyingrobots

Description

@flyingrobots

Context

Echo carries ~309 markdown docs. The authoritative surfaces (docs/spec/,
docs/quickstart-local-contract-host.md, ARCHITECTURE.md) are excellent but
swim in a much larger sea of historical design packets, and external
consumers can't tell which layer they're reading. Two concrete failure modes
observed while building Graft's Echo integration witness:

  • SPEC-0009 documented the EINT v1 layout without naming the layer it binds,
    and never mentioned the session-proto EINT v2 (fixed in Worktree-safe verify-local stamps; SPEC-0009 EINT v1/v2 layer clarification #534) — doc drift
    that only source-validation caught.
  • An integrator's natural reading path (README → docs/) gives no way to
    distinguish "contract you can build against" from "design history."

Idea

  1. Classify every doc into three tiers: authoritative contract (spec/,
    quickstart, ARCHITECTURE), living direction (BEARING, NORTHSTAR, METHOD),
    and historical design packets (the long tail).
  2. The Tome: one narrative, source-cited reference in the style of
    Wesley's docs/END_TO_END.md + docs/TECHNICAL_TEARDOWN.md — domain
    dictionary, golden paths, payload anatomy, authority boundaries — built
    from tier-1 docs and live source.
  3. Archive historical packets under docs/design/archive/ with an index
    manifest mapping each to its landing PR/commit, excluded from the
    "current truth" reading path.
  4. Citation lint: authoritative docs cite source as
    [<filepath>#<line>@<git sha>]; CI (docs-truth style, as Wesley already
    does) flags dangling paths so drift like the EINT v2 gap fails loudly
    instead of silently.

First step

Generate an inventory (path, title, status marker, last-touched commit) and
propose the tier split as a reviewable PR — no deletions, moves only.


Filed from the Graft integration lane under the standing cool-ideas grant.

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