:PROPERTIES:
:CREATED:  [2026-06-04 Thu]
:END:
#+title: The Provenance Chain as Product
#+filetags: :passepartout:architecture:

In the coding domain, the value of the symbolic engine is the verified fact: "this command is safe." In the broader memex, the value is the provenance itself: "this claim originated in that diary entry on that date, has been referenced 7 times across 4 different projects, was contradicted in a retrospective 6 months later, and was revised in a note 3 weeks after that."

The symbolic engine doesn't tell you what is true. It tells you what you wrote, when, where, and how it connects to everything else you wrote — with a verifiable audit trail. It is a memory prosthesis that makes your own mind legible to you.

Every fact carries:
- =:grounding= — the specific Org heading from which it was extracted
- =:provenance= — who or what produced it (gate-outcome, human-authored, deduced, LLM-proposed)
- =:timestamp= — when it was admitted to the symbolic index
- =:referenced-by= — other facts that depend on or reference this one
- =:contradicted-by= — other facts that disagree with this one (if any)
- =:superseded-by= — if this fact was replaced by a newer version

These fields make every fact auditable. The =/audit <node-id>= command renders the full provenance chain as an Org headline tree. The provenance is not a logging feature. It is the product.