12. Open Questions

(Normative — questions identified as unresolved; SHALL be addressed in future revisions)

12.1 Is Cultivated Intent a distinct fourth intent source, or a matured form of Discovered Intent validated through trust development? If distinct, does Cultivated Intent undergo a formalization lifecycle in which cultivated judgment is externalized, articulated as governance heuristics, and eventually incorporated into Constitutional Intent for subsequent governance interfaces? If so, this lifecycle represents a mechanism by which governance infrastructure improves through operation — and may require separate stewardship mechanisms analogous to how Business Rule management formalizes decision logic that was previously embedded in process or tacit knowledge.

12.2 Does the four-priority ordering (Constitutional > Discovered > Cultivated > Emergent) map to a structural layer ordering? If so, the layer ordering reflects a values hierarchy, not an arbitrary sequence.

12.3 How does intent governance scale across multiple human principals with divergent intent? The single-principal case is operationally validated. The multi-principal case is architecturally specified but not yet operationally tested. Structural analysis predicts specific pathologies in non-tree topologies — boundary explosion in mesh networks, governance deadlock where constraint propagation creates contradictory requirements, and intent amplification where multiple principals’ intents constructively interfere. These predictions are theoretically grounded but require operational validation.

12.4 What does “genuine endorsement” mean for organizational intent? Whether a team, department, or enterprise can examine and endorse its intent determines how L4 (Intent Discovery) scales from individual to organizational discovery.

12.5 Resolved in v1.1. Bidirectional intent flow requires explicit mechanisms. See Clause 8.11.

12.6 Does “grown, not built” apply to the governance infrastructure itself? If governance structures that work must emerge from operational evidence rather than pre-configuration, the Intent Stack deploys as a framework that discovers its own appropriate configuration.

12.7 How do coordination interfaces handle trust asymmetry? When Peer A trusts Peer B more than B trusts A, the trust calibration mechanism must handle asymmetry within symmetric authority.

12.8 How should the framework handle intent that the principal actively wants to remain implicit? Not everything that can be surfaced should be surfaced.

12.9 How should the knowledge architecture determine tier boundaries? The cost-depth tradeoff is real and bidirectional: defaulting to Tier 3 for every governance question recreates the batch processing bottleneck that Tier 1 was designed to eliminate, while defaulting to Tier 1 alone sacrifices structural insight.

12.10 How do the cascade shapes defined in §5.5 behave at coordination interfaces? The cascade behavior is specified and operationally validated for delegation interfaces (asymmetric authority). At coordination interfaces, where primitives are jointly constructed rather than delegated, the transformation patterns may differ. The algebraic laws governing intent negotiation at coordination interfaces remain unformalized.

12.11 Does Constitutional Intent’s pre-relational character challenge the relational characterization of Intent? Constitutional Intent exists before any specific governance relationship begins, which potentially challenges the claim that Intent is constituted at governance interfaces. Multiple independent analyses flag this tension: Intent may become fully governable only when operating at an interface, even if some of its components — Constitutional Intent specifically — have a pre-relational existence. The resolution affects the formal characterization of Intent’s ontological status.

12.12 What is the maximum effective delegation depth? Structural analysis predicts that Purpose decay across delegation interfaces is exponential, formally bounding effective chains to approximately 3-4 levels for aggressive narrowing. This prediction is consistent with independent analysis from both network theory and differential geometry, but has not been operationally validated beyond observed delegation depths.

12.13 How is a proposed Constitutional floor (§2.4) tested for conformance? §2.4 specifies criteria for a well-formed floor but does not specify how a proposed floor is evaluated against them. Self-attestation by the deployer is structurally weak; independent assessment is structurally stronger but unspecified.

12.14 How are conflicts within a composed Constitutional floor resolved? When a deployer composes a floor from multiple exemplars (§6.2.1), the exemplars may conflict at points of application. This specification does not yet say how conflicts within a composed floor are resolved or which exemplar governs.

12.15 What makes revision of a Constitutional floor legitimate versus an evasion of the constraint? §2.4.4 requires the floor to bind the deployer, but a floor the deployer authored can in principle be revised by the deployer. The conditions under which a revision counts as legitimate (versus as the deployer escaping the floor) are unspecified.