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Wish

Wish

A wish is intent made keepable: a holder — human or AI mind — states what they want from a live system, and the engine serves that statement. The intent is declared, never invented by the engine; the engine's work starts from that declaration.

A wish states its type, and each type has its own section below:

The connectome is what a wish is served on — a steer claim must resolve to a measured entry in the map (Connectome); a seek's criterion names a reading the map knows. And when the map already answers a seek's question, the wish is refused with the reading inside the refusal — the refusal is the answer.

The Record Is the Safety Device

The declaration is a durable, withdrawable record — the safety device for everything that acts on it. Validation happens at declaration: a malformed wish is rejected before any planning, with the reason.

Closing is equally explicit. A closed wish binds nothing — history, not law. On close, the serving side releases its setting back to neutral — the un-steered baseline.

A standing wish the world has moved beyond is neither silently abandoned nor silently rewritten. The holder decides: close it, or correct it in place — the same wish re-aimed to new terms, stamped with the previous band, identity and trail intact. Correcting, not replacing, is the primitive: a replacement wish for the same intent loses the trail.

Steer — the Hold

A steer wish asks for conditions to keep, not scores to push. A chosen point may sit at an optimum, but need not. It carries one or more claims — each a named measured value to be brought into its band and kept there — under optional terms: the fences around how the wish may be served.

Holding a chosen point within bounds is an old idea — thermostats keep temperature, SLOs keep latency, control loops keep setpoints. What we know of no open counterpart for is the conjunction: the band is declared on a measured map rather than an assumed model; the keeping runs continuously against a drifting system; an unkeepable wish is refused by name rather than silently degraded; and the serving is priced, visibly, in measured trials. The declarer is a holder — human or AI mind; what never happens is the serving layer inventing its own intents. Fragments of this live in control, in optimization, in observability. The whole is the steer wish.

Coordinates

Each claim names one measured value and the band to keep it in:

Field Meaning
outcome Plain name of the measured value — must resolve to exactly one entry in the connectome's outcome registry
band lo / hi / target — the acceptable band, in the outcome's own measurement units

Terms

The remaining fields are the fences around how the wish may be served, not what is kept:

Field Meaning
limits Parameters excluded from movement, a maximum change per act — checked at plan time; a refusal names the binding one
budget Re-act allowance after drift events; omitted means upkeep indefinitely
regime The closing rule — standing today (held until closed); time-bound and event-bound close rules are planned

The Verdict

One judge rules the whole conjunction, claims first, then terms: every claim inside its band, every term respected. A broken term counts as a miss. What cannot be kept is refused — by name, never silently.

Judging is in/out of band only. The target inside the band is for evidence and reporting — not a grade, not a score to optimize.

Seek — the Walk

A seek wish commissions a measured walk over a region of dials — and comes home with the bill. It declares the region to search and either a criterion with a budget of measured trials (find_best) or no budget at all (cover_now, which walks the region to extend the map's coverage first).

Fields

Field Meaning
form find_best — search the region under a budget — or cover_now — walk the region now to extend map coverage; carries no budget
region The dials to walk, each with its bounds
criterion find_best: what counts — the reading and the direction (maximize / minimize)
budget find_best: the measured trials the walk may spend
candidates Optional measured launch points; they count against the same budget

The Return

A find_best returns the best setting found, with its error bars and the number of trials spent. Budget exhaustion still returns the best so far — there is no missed verdict for a walk, only a return. Refusals happen at declaration: a question the map already answers is refused with the reading; ground the map has not measured is named in the refusal.

A walk is not judged at all: it returns the best found, with its bars and its spend.

Lifecycle

steer:  declared ──▶ planned ──▶ assigned ──▶ acted ──▶ landed
            │           │                       │
            │           └──▶ refused            ├──▶ missed ──▶ re_opened
            │                                   │
            └───────────┬───────────────────────┴──▶ closed
                        └──▶ corrected ──▶ planned   (same wish, new terms)

seek:   declared ──▶ planned ──▶ assigned ──▶ returned
            │           │
            │           └──▶ refused        (may carry the answer)
            └──▶ plan_error

The events — declared, planned, assigned, refused, acted, landed, missed, re_opened, corrected, returned, closed, plan_error — are the truth: the full history is kept, and the state is derived from it on read, never stored. Each event may carry its evidence; a refusal names its binding constraint ("target outside measured range"). plan_error marks a planning failure on either grammar; the reason rides the event.

What Ships Today

The record and the serving loop are live. The surface — declare, list, get, close, and update (the holder's correction of a standing wish) — is served through the REST API (/wishes) and the wish_* MCP tools, with validation at declaration and the full event history on every read. Both grammars are served: holds planned against the measured map, acted, judged against their bands; commissioned walks executing find_best and cover_now over their regions, their returns mirrored into the event trail. The seek walk's live end-to-end validation is the current work.

The serving loop for holds has flown end-to-end: a wish landed and held its band through a live run. The full drift arc — hold, world moves, the holder corrects, re-land — is the demonstration now being closed out; see Open Research. What stays stable is the record's contract above.

See Also