ADR-0014: Project Constitution

Status

Accepted

Context

Non-negotiables (customer-environment trust boundary, fail-closed behaviour, PII hygiene, bounded memory, no merge shortcuts, documentation currency) lived across ADRs, Cursor rules, and CONTRIBUTING prose. Agents and contributors lacked a single citeable document, and most principles were honour-system rather than CI-enforced.

Decision

Adopt a root CONSTITUTION.md as the canonical article list (I–X). CI and pre-commit gates documented in docs/ci-gates.md enforce automatable articles. A Cursor rule always points assistants at the constitution. Amendments follow Article IX (ADR + PR updating CONSTITUTION.md).

Detailed gate design lives in OpenSpec change add-ci-hardening-gates.

Consequences

• Humans and agents have one north-star document.
• New scanners map to article IDs; waivers cite article + issue.
• Runtime engine behaviour is unchanged by adopting the constitution itself.