"The Corpus: Radical Transparency as a File Format"

The institutional memory of the whole system is a git repository of plain, sorted, human-readable files. That’s not a limitation — it’s the design.

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The Mirror only works if there’s somewhere for institutional memory to live. That’s the org-judgement-corpus: a git repository that accumulates every gate run’s telemetry, every override calibration, every weekly pulse, across every project in the portfolio.

The layout

org-judgement-corpus/
├── telemetry/     — raw per-run results, by project and date
├── snapshots/     — per-project daily state (SwiftZIP, org-judgement-system, …)
├── pulse/         — weekly institutional pulses (pulse/2026-06-07/, …)
└── manifest.yml   — the corpus's own description of itself

The Aggregator layer’s TelemetryWriter — an actor, so concurrent writes are safe — collects decisions into this deterministic hierarchy, organized by project, date, and timestamp.

Lossless, on purpose

The single most important design constraint is that every write is lossless and human-inspectable. ISO-8601 dates. Sorted JSON keys. Readable paths. No binary blobs, no opaque database, no schema you need a tool to read. You can cat any file in the corpus and understand what it says.

This is radical transparency implemented as a file format. Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater records its decision-making so it can be examined and learned from; the corpus does the same thing for an engineering organization, and it does it in the most examinable medium there is — sorted text in a git repo, with full history. Three months from now, when someone asks “why did we override that safety check in March,” the answer is a file, dated, with the reasoning intact, in the commit history.

One writer

There’s a deliberate rule: only the tool writes to the corpus. Hand-editing corpus files drifts them from the writer’s schema and poisons the provenance — so ijs-telemetry is the single writer, and that single-writer discipline is what keeps the corpus trustworthy enough to base decisions on. (Enforcing that — that only verified writers can commit — is the job of the Trust Service.)

A memory you can’t trust is worse than no memory. The corpus earns trust by being lossless, single-writer, and readable by a human at 2 a.m. without a special tool.

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Source: github.com/jpurnell/org-judgement-corpus