How It Grows
A scheduled machine proposes candidate ironies, an adversarial gate scores them on five axes, and survivors arrive as a pull request. Merging is the selection pressure — nothing reaches canon without a human hand.
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Table of Contents
The vault grows on a cycle. The machine proposes; the reader disposes.
idea ──SCOUT──▶ candidate ──▶ ╔═════════════╗
║ ALANIS GATE ║──fail──▶ compost/
╚══════╤══════╝ (the merely
pass │ unfortunate)
▼
SCRIBE ──▶ nursery/ (pull request)
│
human merge = selection
▼
canon
The five roles
Scout proposes candidates for the cycle’s domain — history of science, literature and language, technology, politics, commerce, or the vault itself. It is rewarded for one true irony and penalised for five plausible ones.
The Alanis Gate scores each candidate 0–2 on five axes — reversal, commentary, inevitability, specificity, and non-substitutability — and rejects anything that reduces to bad luck, coincidence, hypocrisy, or plain tragedy. Threshold is 7 of 10.
Scribe drafts the survivors against the entry schema, with sources, and
downgrades veracity when the evidence is thin rather than sharpening the
story to match the telling.
Linker weaves new entries into the graph, and Gardener tends it — deduplicating, chasing orphans, and revisiting futures as they mature.
What the gate throws away
The rejects are kept. Every failed candidate is logged in the
compost ledger with its verdict:
MERELY-UNFORTUNATE, BAD-LUCK, COINCIDENCE, HYPOCRISY, or
NOT-EVEN-WRONG. The negative space of a definition teaches as much as the
definition — and history occasionally files an appeal.
Veracity, because good stories lie
Every entry carries a rating: attested, contested, legend, or
speculative. The better an anecdote, the more likely history has sharpened
it. A pipeline that harvests great stories without a veracity axis will
launder legends into an encyclopedia at machine speed, so the vault flags
uncertainty as first-class metadata rather than quietly inheriting it.
The guardrails are code, not etiquette
The engine may write to exactly two places: the nursery and the compost ledger. It cannot modify canon, its own prompts, the workflows, or the configuration — the restriction is a path whitelist enforced by a function that throws, not a sentence in a prompt asking nicely.
Promotion to canon happens one way: a human merges the pull request. That is the whole governance model, and it is the reason this site can be grown by a machine without becoming a landfill.