Pursuit intent continuity

KFD Candidate: Pursuit Intent Continuity

• Candidate status: promoted to KFD-9
• Kind candidate: principle
• Allocated decision: 9
• Slot binding: non-binding

Formal candidate

Promotion

This candidate was promoted on 2026-07-21 to KFD-9. The numbered draft is now the authoritative rule and its formal reference owns the current non-normative model. This page remains source-candidate lineage.

One sentence

Intent that survives an action must have an identity independent of the action that advances it.

Candidate rule

A Pursuit is the cross-domain action coordinate that preserves the continuity of an intended real-world change across Episodes, participants, tools, plans, and revisions.

It makes independently addressable:

• the continuing direction or intended change;
• the conditions under which consequence would count as progress or success;
• decomposition, dependency, contribution, and successor relations;
• revision, pause, settlement, abandonment, and unresolved state;
• the distinction between technical execution and real-world completion.

A Pursuit is not a command, session, provider goal, mutable task body, plan, or Episode. Those objects may advance or project it without defining its durable identity.

Relation to the action system

Within the cross-domain action coordinate candidate, Pursuit answers:

What intended change continues across this action, and what consequence would
matter to it?

Pursuit does not grant authority and does not define the perspective from which progress is judged. It may reference Atlases, Warrants, and Episodes without inheriting their semantics.

Generative role

Pursuit becomes visible when the observer moves from an executing tool or task to the participant who must sustain a real change across many actions. At that position, sessions and tasks appear as temporary projections while continuity, revision, and settlement remain.

The candidate should be tested against goals, tasks, projects, cases, workflows, missions, plans, and provider-specific long-running job objects.

The non-normative formal candidate defines Pursuit versions, prospective direction, consequence review, typed relation graphs, transitions, session projection, and proof obligations without fixing one product workflow.

Invalid compressions

The candidate rejects systems that infer:

• durable intent identity from a session or mutable task record;
• success from command exit, Episode sealing, or artifact production;
• parent completion from child completion;
• child authority from Pursuit decomposition;
• stable success criteria from the latest prose alone;
• continuity from accidental identifier reuse.

Qualification gate

Promotion requires:

1. histories where one intent survives several non-isomorphic actions, participants, tools, or revisions;
2. deletion witnesses where removing Pursuit identity changes continuation, settlement, or audit;
3. comparison with goal, task, project, workflow, case, mission, and session alternatives;
4. cross-domain decomposition and successor evidence;
5. negative evidence separating occurrence, technical success, progress, completion, and settlement;
6. a product witness that lowers continuity reconstruction without forcing unnecessary ceremony;
7. independent review of whether Pursuit belongs at standard level.

Falsifiers

The candidate weakens or fails if:

• ordinary existing goal or case identity preserves equivalent continuity at lower total cost;
• intent does not survive action boundaries often enough to require a separate object;
• Pursuit cannot remain distinct from Atlas, Warrant, or Episode;
• decomposition and settlement rules fail to transfer across domains;
• product evidence measures workflow preference rather than preserved real-world continuity.

Numbering boundary

The former slot hint was non-binding until explicit promotion. KFD-9 is now allocated by decisions/KFD-9.md and registry.json; this lineage document does not replace or extend that numbered authority.