Provenance
The unit of value isn’t a message passed along. It’s a traceable agreement — one you can follow, end to end, and trust.
Trace any built thing back to the agreement that produced it.
Nothing in the work is an orphan. Every line of it has a parent — and you can walk the family tree in either direction.
The chain · the read side
The thing that’s actually running — the feature, the change, the behaviour in the world.
The numbered requirement it satisfies — the named thing that was asked for.
The unit of work that carried it through build and QA.
The message that put it on the docket — who raised it, in writing.
The moment it was discussed and agreed — pinned to the calendar.
The summary written from that meeting — an annotation of what was decided.
The verbatim record — the bedrock. The truth everything above rests on.
A clean, bidirectional flow. Start at the live result and walk down to the words that produced it — or start at a conversation and walk up to everything it became.
One system, two ends
Looking back. Pick anything that exists and follow it down to the agreement that produced it. Every step is recorded, so every step is checkable.
This is the chain above — result to transcript, both ways.
Looking forward. The one and only place new scope or a change is allowed to enter — and each one is logged with its source anchor as it comes in.
If it didn’t come through the door, it isn’t in the work.
Two ends of the same system. The write-side door records the anchor going in; the read-side chain lets you walk it back out.
Requirement provenance
A requirement isn’t just text — it’s text plus where it came from: a meeting date and time, a pointer to the transcript, and the submitting email. Those three together are its anchor.
And about the summaries: AI summaries are derived, never primary. A summary may annotate a requirement — add a gloss, a heading, a recap — but it can never be the requirement. The requirement points at the transcript, not at the note about it.
Project provenance
That’s the whole definition. The project is its provenance: the scope that was accepted, and every change that came through the door after — each one anchored to its source.
The effect is quiet but total: scope creep and disputes have nowhere to hide. “Who asked for this?” has an answer. “When did we agree to that?” has a timestamp. “That’s not what we said” has a transcript. The argument ends because the record settles it.
The payoff
More control, less chaos.
When every built thing traces to an agreement, and every agreement enters through one logged door, you stop relaying decisions and start settling them. That’s provenance — and it’s what puts the client back in control.
Decisions that hold.
No relayed maybes, no phantom scope — just agreements you can trace and trust. Curious what that would do for your work? Pull up a step.
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