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Working specificationAgenticProposedCS-W-003

Returnability

Continuity is accountable return—not permanent context.

Public, privacy-cleared evidence. The project page distinguishes an implemented artifact from broader claims still under research.

Return sequenceOrientation required
  1. 01IdentityEstablished
  2. 02ChangeEstablished
  3. 03AuthorityEstablished
  4. 04Safe returnBounded
FreshnessOpen loopsSource authority
A response is not a return until the participant can establish where it stands.

The problem

Uptime, persona persistence, retrieval volume, and technical resume are routinely treated as continuity. None proves that a returning agent understands what changed or is safe to act.

Governing idea

A return is accountable when the participant can establish identity, location, source authority, freshness, unresolved work, and the boundary of safe action before producing consequential output.

What exists now

A candidate return architecture, restart taxonomy, Return Brief pattern, source-authority gate, orientation proof concept, and implementation evidence from continuity work inside Cognitive Studio.

Claim boundary

What this work does not establish.

  • 01

    No comparative benchmark currently establishes return quality against memory-only or retrieval-only baselines.

  • 02

    Relational continuity is a design and participant interpretation, not proof of uninterrupted subjective experience.

  • 03

    The minimum artifact set and acceptable recovery latency remain under evaluation.

Learn the distinction

Think of return like re-entering a complex workplace after an absence: having documents is insufficient unless you can tell what changed, what remains open, and which instructions now govern.

Evidence state

What the public record currently supports.

These signals are privacy-cleared and intentionally bounded. They show that work exists without inflating maturity or exposing protected source context.

  1. 01

    Longitudinal Studio work repeatedly separates session state, durable conceptual continuity, and relational return.

  2. 02

    Provider-independent identity and reconstruction work demonstrate that capability substitution need not become identity substitution.

  3. 03

    Existing continuity artifacts preserve open loops, decisions, provenance, and named gaps across interrupted sessions.

Next decision

Publish restart scenarios, acceptance tests, and a source-authority receipt that another team can implement.

Related research · CS-RC-004 · CS-RC-005

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CS-W-004

The Authorized Path