plate 02 · the pipeline
How a recording becomes a page
Everything published here starts as audio. What happens between the recording and the page is a fixed pipeline with named artifacts, and the gates in it are the reason nothing ships by accident.
the shape
Two halves that never mix
Stages 0 through 3 are the source. They are immutable and they never advance. Stages 4 through 10 are the work, and they live somewhere else entirely. Nothing past stage 3 is ever written into a source folder.
stages 0 to 3
Ingest
A recording gets an id from the date it was made, and a folder. Each stage adds a numbered artifact and never edits the one before it.
- 00PreserveThe recording is copied to an audio store outside the vault and compared by SHA-256 after the copy. The vault keeps a provenance record, never the media.
00-<id>-audio.json - 01TranscribeLocal transcription. The raw file is immutable. The timed copy carries a stamp per segment, which is what makes chapter links possible later.
01-<id>-transcript-raw.md, 01-<id>-transcript-timed.md - 02CleanMechanics only. Punctuation and obvious mishearings. No rewriting, no tightening, no improving.
02-<id>-transcript-clean.md - 03ExtractDistinct concepts, an editorial read, and routing proposals. This stage proposes and does not route.
03-<id>-concepts-and-recommendations.md
A scheduled job does stages 0 through 2 and stops. Stage 3 and every routing decision stay with the author. An unattended run may not publish, may not change visibility, may not set a gate, and may not delete. Agents draft. The author decides.
stages 4 to 10
Work
When an idea is worth developing it gets promoted into a work folder with its own index, its own log, and its own gates. Four of the seven stages have an approval attached.
| Stage | Artifact | Gate |
|---|---|---|
| 04 Critical thinking | 04-critical-thinking-analysis.md | gate_belief_clarification |
| 05 Outline | 05-outline.md | gate_structure_approval |
| 06 Draft | 06-draft.md | gate_content_approval |
| 07 Editorial review | 07-editorial-review.md | none |
| 08 Source verification | 08-source-verification.md | none |
| 09 Presentation | 09-presentation.md | none |
| 10 Final | 10-final.md | gate_publication_approval |
Stage 4 is mandatory for every work, whatever its type. Marking it not applicable is a waiver rather than a default, and it only holds with a reason written into the work log. An unreasoned waiver reads as pending.
stage 04
Critical thinking
The stage that stops a work from being a well-written version of something the author does not actually believe.
It is a live conversation, not a document the machine produces. The artifact records confirmed answers only. A step nobody got to is written down as not yet addressed rather than filled in.
Below the top level it runs in tiers. A course gets all ten steps live. A module gets five, drafted and then reviewed. A lesson gets three, and anything it cannot settle escalates upward. A lower tier may never confirm a belief.
- 01
Clarify the claim, and classify it as empirical, interpretive, value, or identity
- 02
Origins and stakes
- 03
Evidence, separating what was observed from what was inherited
- 04
Assumptions, meaning what has to be true for the claim to stand
- 05
Bias scan, run as testable hypotheses rather than as diagnoses
- 06
Steelmanned alternatives
- 07
Consequences and audience
- 08
Falsifiability
- 09
Belief restatement, calibrated, with a confidence out of ten
- 10
Writing decisions: thesis wording, term choices, metaphor, which references stay
the gates
What actually blocks
Gates are flat properties with four values: pending, approved, revise, and not applicable. Only an explicit author decision sets one to approved, recorded with the date and the SHA-256 of the thing being approved. The hash is computed after the approval is written in.
| Gate | Sits on | Blocks |
|---|---|---|
gate_source_preservation | the recording index | Unattended cleanup, until the source is confirmed intact |
gate_belief_clarification | the work index | Planning and prose, until stage 4 reflects what the author believes |
gate_structure_approval | the work index | The outline, before any prose is written |
gate_content_approval | the work index | The draft, before verification |
gate_publication_approval | the work index | Everything, before it ships |
Only two of these are enforced by code, both at publication. Nothing checks stage transitions, so a work can sit at stage 6 with an unapproved gate for as long as it likes. It simply cannot publish. The rest is contract rather than enforcement.
care
Sensitivity travels with the material
Sensitivity says why a note needs care. It is inherited from the sources a work draws on rather than declared on the work itself.
The author's own life
Health, mental health, relationships, finances, spiritual practice. Publishable only by deliberate choice, never by inference.
Identifiable other people
Consent required before publication, recorded by name. Pending or refused blocks publication absolutely.
Client and legal material
Never publishable. It may exist in the vault and it may never reach a final artifact or a shareable note.
The publication check reads the whole tree, so a private passage inside one lesson blocks the course containing it. The signing step refuses any release whose provenance reaches personal, confidential, or third-party material without approval, and there is no override flag.
worked example
The podcast release
The full lifecycle, from a recording to three published artifacts. The last three steps are the three things an episode page carries.
- 01RecordA voice note or an episode take. The file lands in the drop zone outside the vault.
- 02Ingest through stage 03Preserve, transcribe, clean, extract. The raw transcript is never edited after this.
- 03Content edit draftA pass over the transcript to mark anything sensitive or confidential for removal. The marks are proposals until approved.
- 04Audio edit to matchThe same removals applied to the audio, saved as a separate release version. The original stays intact in the store.
- 05Editing pass and publishRiverside pass, then out to the podcast platforms.
- 06Download the production fileThe released cut comes back down as the artifact of record.
- 07Hash and signSHA-256 over the production file, recorded with the approval. See the note below on md5.
- 08Publish the audioThe file goes to Cloudflare and the episode page points at it.
- 09Publish the inventoryEverything named on air, grouped, each entry with somewhere to go.
- 10Publish the transcriptIts own artifact, with its own provenance and its own correction history.
Use SHA-256, not md5. Md5 has been broken for collision resistance since 2004, so it cannot support a signature that is meant to prove a file is the file that was approved.
It also has to match what is already there. Every gate approval in the vault binds a SHA-256, and the content schema on this site requires a 64 character hex digest on every published file. An md5 is 32 characters and would be rejected at build time.
the spec layer
What governs the pipeline
Two open specifications sit underneath this. They are written for agents and the vault is one implementation of them.
Blueprint
draftHow knowledge is held, governed, and exchanged.
One brain in ten layers, and three boundaries. Knowledge crosses to another brain, to a model, or into the tooling, and each crossing is an act that has to be authorized.
sagaSAGA
draftState Archive for General Agents.
Portable agent identity, memory, and state. A wallet address is the identity rather than a platform account, and a document is a definition rather than a snapshot.
Both are drafts and neither is adopted. Blueprint's own rule is that nothing is adopted until it lands as a decision record, and it has no decision records yet. Several of its layers are deferred, and one of the seven documents is a stated skeleton whose conformance may not be claimed.
SAGA is fully written and has a reference implementation. It also has a schema that is ahead of its own specification text, and one layer that appears in the spec and not in the schema.
known gaps
Where this does not hold yet
Listed rather than quietly settled, on the same principle the rest of the library runs on.
- There is no Method framework blueprint spec source ingest.The phrase is used in planning and no spec by that name exists in the vault or in the Blueprint repository. The ingest described on this page is the one that actually runs.
- The preservation gate is contradicted between layers.A 2026-08-31 ruling says it no longer blocks import or routing. The guard code and the cleanup skill still hard-block on it. Both are live and nothing reconciles them.
- Not applicable has no defined criterion on four of the five gates. The vault calls this a known gap rather than a permission.
- Stage transitions are unenforced. Only publication is checked by code.
- Stage 2 has two filenames across three documents, and both appear on disk.
the study
A voice measured against itself
288,318 words of raw transcripts, analysed for vocabulary, transition habits, and sentence rhythm, then turned into a style guide agents can be held to.
The skills, templates, and automation described here are being prepared as a public repository with a full user guide. It is not published yet, and this page will carry the link when it is.