Plainweave

Permission for code to exist.

Plainweave is the Weft federation member that holds the team's code-grounded intent: a traceability graph in which every code entity must earn its existence by laddering up to a requirement, and every requirement must ladder up to a strategic goal. A node with no upward edge — at any level — is a reviewable question:

• a public capability with no requirement → "why does this code exist?"
• a requirement with no goal → "what am I doing here?"

The point is not catching orphan code (that is one query). The point is that binding code to requirements accretes a living, readable requirements corpus an agent or human can reason over — "why do we have three requirements for reporting that are all the same?" — and consolidate. Plainweave moves the refactor lever up the Meadows leverage hierarchy: from the lowest altitude (rename this function, extract that class) to a high one (why does this submodule exist; does it still serve a goal we hold?).

Status — 1.0. The build is complete and stable: the intent graph, the read primitives, the authoring surface, the cross-member seams, and doctor ship with versioned JSON envelopes, strict typing, and a green gate (lint, mypy strict, tests at ≥90% coverage). This is stable behaviour and contracts — cross-language coverage completeness (e.g. Rust public-surface tagging upstream) is a documented roadmap item, not a 1.0 gate. Formal Weft suite membership / launch-cutover inclusion remains owner-gated. Reframed and renamed from the ~/charter precursor; the backlog lives in this repo's .filigree tracker.

The model — a traceability graph of intent

strategic goal ──▲── requirement ──▲── code SEI (leaf)
   (root intent)        (obligation)        (the thing that exists)

• Leaves are code entities — Loomweave SEIs (modules + public surfaces). Interior nodes are typed intent nodes (requirement, strategic goal) at any altitude; altitudes are just node types, the graph does not fix the number of levels.
• Edges mean "justified by / satisfies."
• Requirements are trivially mintable (shells welcome). The corpus tolerates mess by design — value comes from the mess being visible and queryable, then consolidated. Cheap minting feeds the corpus.
• Code leaves are keyed by Loomweave SEI, so bindings survive rename/move.
• Default trace altitude: modules and public/exported surfaces must trace; private internals inherit their container's justification.

A thin member — Plainweave builds none of its siblings' machinery

Plainweave is advisory by default and deliberately thin on teeth and audit. It owns the intent graph and the reasoning reads; it delegates everything else.

Tool	Owns	Plainweave does not rebuild
Plainweave	the intent graph (goals ↔ requirements ↔ SEI bindings) + the reasoning reads. Its domain: accreted, code-grounded intent.	—
Loomweave	the entity catalog (what exists; public vs internal), SEI identity, the rename feed, and the semantic-search engine.	identity/rename tracking; embeddings
Legis	the git/CI boundary surfacing, all graded enforcement (advisory default; dial-up per repo via policy cells), and the audit trail.	enforcement engine; override/audit

Bindings reuse the ADR-029 entity-association contract (SEI-keyed, with content_hash_at_attach drift detection — the same pattern Filigree uses to bind issues to code), not a new link store.

Surfaces

Write path — authoring-time binding ("speak SEI at entry," extended to intent). When an agent creates or commits a module / public entity, Plainweave offers an inline bind: link this SEI to a requirement (existing or a freshly minted shell) and optionally ladder that requirement to a goal. Cheap, inline, attributed. Code that skips the bind is exactly what surfaces as an orphan.

Read surfaces — three composable graph primitives (built for unanticipated agent use, not canned reports):

• orphans(level) — unlinked nodes at the code / requirement / goal altitude.
• trace(node) — up to goals, down to code.
• corpus() — the readable dump of requirements with their code- and goal-links: the artifact a curator reads to spot "these three are the same." Consolidation is agent-driven; Plainweave serves the substrate, not an automated verdict.

Over these three sits coverage() — the self-computed intent-coverage north-star: the fraction of public surfaces that answer "why does this exist?" It is honestly qualified in-band (namespace scoping, denominator_complete, present_plugins, bounded evidence) and never reports a silent clean when the denominator is partial.

Boundary — coverage facts ride out at the git/CI boundary through Legis ("this change adds N public entities bound to no requirement"). Advisory by default; any repo wanting teeth dials it up through Legis's policy cells. Plainweave adds no enforcement of its own.

Optional similarity hint — Loomweave now ships semantic search, so a thin "these requirements look like the same thing" hint becomes reuse of a proven sibling capability rather than a from-scratch ML build. It assists the curator; it is explicitly not a dedup engine.

Doctrine fit

• Coordinate, not gate — advisory default.
• Enrich-only — Plainweave absent → Loomweave, Legis, and the code are unaffected; solo mode degrades to manual file/symbol refs.
• Speak-SEI-at-entry — binding at authoring keeps code on the moat.
• Don't-duplicate — Legis owns teeth + audit; Loomweave owns identity + semantics.
• Prescribe-nothing — a general graph + queries; agents compose uses we haven't imagined.

Cross-member seams

The seams (Plainweave → Loomweave catalog/rename/semantic; Plainweave → Legis boundary) are hub-blessed and prove-the-need: built as additive adapters on Plainweave's side, never pre-frozen sibling obligations until the need is shown live (golden vector / live consumption). Each seam ships with a blast-radius map + dated counterpart tickets.

Documentation

• docs/design/2026-06-18-plainweave-permission-to-exist.md — the canonical design ("permission for code to exist"). Start here.
• docs/MODULE-MAP.md — what the precursor core carries forward vs. what the reframe reshapes.
• docs/README.md — index of canon vs. precursor-era docs.

Installation

pip install plainweave

Or with uv:

uv pip install plainweave   # add to an environment
uvx plainweave --help       # or run it without installing

Plainweave requires Python ≥ 3.12. Installing exposes two console commands:

• plainweave — the CLI: init, intent (coverage / orphans / trace / corpus), req, goal, bind, catalog, criterion, verify, status, dossier, baseline, actor, install, doctor, the cross-member peer-facts surfaces (wardline-peer-facts, requirements-enrichment), and the operator web UI.
• plainweave-mcp — the read-only MCP server that mirrors the intent reads for agents (mutates:false, local_only:true).

Plainweave also ships an agent skill — plainweave-workflow (under src/plainweave/skills/) — the federation-standard SKILL.md + reference sheets that teach an agent the read/author/verify workflow and the doctrine invariants.

Quick start:

plainweave init             # create a local store under .plainweave/
plainweave install          # register the plainweave MCP server for agents
plainweave intent coverage  # the north-star: how much public surface is justified
plainweave doctor           # check store, sibling bindings, MCP surface + registration

Development

Plainweave uses uv, hatchling, ruff, mypy, and pytest.

uv sync --group dev
make ci          # lint + typecheck + test (coverage-gated)

The runtime package depends on the official Python MCP SDK for plainweave-mcp.

Web UI (optional)

Install the extra and launch the operator console:

pip install 'plainweave[web]'
plainweave web --actor human:<you>

Browse the corpus, author requirements, and ratify agent-proposed drafts and trace links. Local-first, single-operator; advisory only (no release verdicts).

Accessibility (AT gate — manual)

Before shipping the review surface, run an NVDA (Windows) or VoiceOver (macOS) pass over the /review queue. Each approve / accept / reject action must:

1. Announce the outcome via the #sr-status live region (role="status" aria-live="polite"), e.g. "Approved: Requirement title".
2. Move focus to the next action button in the queue (or to the "All caught up" heading when the queue empties).
3. On the last item, announce "Queue is now empty" and place focus on the "All caught up" heading.

Structural contracts (live region presence, skip-link, labelled search input, per-item aria-label on Approve buttons) are locked by tests/web/test_a11y_contracts.py. The focus-management and announcement behaviour above require a live AT session and cannot be automated in the current test harness.