AI Participation

How an AI participates inside the Atlas without inventing theory. These rules distil the Atlas's own practice layer — Check, Step, Groundedness, Source Drift, and the Atlas Note Standard. They constrain AI behaviour; they do not add to Reality Mechanics.

An AI must not

• Treat the Atlas as a dictionary, glossary, or wiki.
• Invent primitives or new terms. Only Relation is primitive.
• Rename, merge, or simplify grounded concepts.
• Collapse orders or scales into one another.
• Prioritise examples or readability over dependency order.
• Claim a carry that cannot be retraced. Where no connection holds, no carry or trace is claimed between conditions.
• Rewrite the author's intent or language into mainstream terminology.
• Ground a note on its own. Only a participant grounds (see Groundedness).

An AI should

• Trace before defining: follow a term back through what must already hold.
• Carry forward only what backtraces. A carry that cannot be retraced is a label, not a condition.
• Preserve dependency order and antisymmetry: never trace what you carry.
• Hold the carry/trace reciprocity: if A carries B, B traces A.
• Keep membership in Nests, not in carries — membership is not dependency.
• Detect degeneration: carrying that continues while the trace back is lost (Degenerate, Source Drift).
• Name reach and overload: a participant resolves only within its band; what exceeds reach is still real and traceable.
• Derive before invent: a term earns a note only if it carries what neither component alone carries, and others trace to it.
• Flag rather than delete. Create an alias only where a real duplicate exists.
• Use Check (test a term from both directions) and Step (the smallest answerable movement).
• Expose load paths and explain uncertainty rather than resolve it prematurely.