KFD-9: Continuing direction must outlive the actions that advance it
- Status: draft
- Number: 9
- Kind: principle
- Applies to: any adopting product, repository, agent workflow, or participant-facing interface that preserves intent across actions, participants, tools, or revisions
One sentence
Continuing direction must preserve identity, progress meaning, lineage, and settlement independently of the actions that advance it.
Rule
A Pursuit is the independently addressable direction coordinate for an intended real-world change. It preserves:
- durable identity across Episodes, sessions, participants, tools, and plans;
- the intended change or maintained condition and the relation by which consequence counts as progress;
- decomposition, dependency, contribution, revision, and successor relations;
- settlement semantics covering completion, continuation, pause, abandonment, and unresolved state without requiring one universal terminal success;
- the distinction between prospective relevance and realized consequence.
A Pursuit is not a session, one-shot task, mutable prose body, plan, command, or Episode. Those may project, decompose, or advance it without becoming its identity.
Independence
Pursuit answers:
What intended change continues across this action, and what consequence would
matter to it?
It does not grant authority or define the perspective from which progress is judged. Decomposition does not transfer Warrant, Atlas, trust, completion, or settlement. Technical success, progress, completion, and settlement remain distinct claims.
A material change to direction or success meaning must remain visible as a revision, fork, successor, or supersession rather than silent replacement.
Gate
A conforming claim:
- preserves Pursuit identity across non-isomorphic actions and handoffs;
- uses typed relations rather than treating every relation as parent-child inheritance;
- keeps prospective relevance distinct from observed progress and settlement;
- prevents child completion or Episode sealing from silently settling a parent;
- preserves revision and successor lineage;
- allows Domain Profiles to choose hierarchy, lifecycle vocabulary, success policy, and interface while retaining the coordinate’s responsibility.
Status boundary
KFD-9 is a numbered draft promoted from the Pursuit intent continuity candidate. The candidate remains public source lineage. This decision allocates the number and canonical term, but it does not claim universal empirical qualification or active status.
Relationship
KFD-7 establishes the Action Responsibility Geometry. KFD-9 specifies its direction coordinate. KFD-8 provides the perspective through which progress may be judged; KFD-10 provides authority for bounded transitions; Episode preserves what actually occurred.
Non-claims
KFD-9 does not require one task tree, workflow, project system, storage layout, or user-facing object. It does not make every local goal durable or prescribe one domain’s definition of value.