Foundation

bijux-canon-index owns governed vector execution. It receives identified documents and vectors, binds them to an immutable execution artifact, selects a capable backend, executes an exact or explicitly bounded plan, and retains the provenance needed to explain and compare the result.

Authority boundary

flowchart LR
    ingest["prepared documents and vectors"]
    request["intent, mode, contract, budget"]
    index["governed vector execution"]
    evidence["results, fingerprints, run record"]
    reason["claim evaluation"]

    ingest --> request --> index --> evidence --> reason

Index does not repair source normalization, decide whether a passage supports a claim, or schedule an end-to-end workflow. It establishes a narrower and testable fact: which vector operation ran under which declared contract, and which ordered results it produced.

Core commitments

Commitment	Meaning	Evidence
Declared intent	exact validation, reproducible research, exploration, and production retrieval are distinguishable	normalized request and run metadata
Capability negotiation	a backend is eligible only when it satisfies the requested contract and metric	capabilities report and resolved plan
Deterministic baseline	strict deterministic work uses exact scoring and refuses incompatible execution	artifact contract, plan fingerprint, ordered results
Honest approximation	ANN behavior carries randomness, error, resource, witness, and replay policy	approximation report and decision trace
Addressable execution	artifacts, runs, correlations, backends, indexes, and parameters have recorded identities	response, ledger, and run directory
Governed comparison	replay evaluates fingerprints and equivalence policy, not result resemblance alone	replay or comparison payload

What the result does not prove

An ExecutionArtifact and complete run record establish execution provenance. They do not establish that the corpus is complete, that the embedding captures the intended meaning, that a neighbor is relevant, or that a retrieved passage supports a conclusion. Those claims require source and reasoning evidence.

Read one ranking without overstating it

An ordered result is the end of several owned decisions. Preserve each one:

Decision	Index evidence	Question still owned elsewhere
corpus eligibility	prepared-record and artifact identity	were the sources normalized and segmented correctly?
request meaning	intent, mode, metric, contract, budget and result count	is this the right retrieval question for the user?
backend eligibility	discovered capabilities, selected backend and effective parameters	is the provider or infrastructure acceptable to the host?
numerical execution	vectors, scoring version, approximation witness, costs and warnings	does the embedding encode the desired semantics?
ordering	result IDs, scores, tie policy, truncation and provenance	does a retrieved passage support a claim?
comparison	original/current artifacts, semantic diff, tolerance and verdict	is the later evidence adequate for the same conclusion?

Index can prove that a candidate ranked at a position under this execution contract. It cannot convert score into truth probability or silently promote a bounded observation to exact evidence.

Supported boundary and exclusions

The v1 boundary centers on synchronous local governed execution. Remote backends, asynchronous services, and streaming search are excluded from the v1 contract. The pgvector adapter remains experimental and is excluded from the v1 freeze. Adapter code may exist without becoming a supported contract; use capability discovery and the documented exclusions rather than inferring support from module presence.

Runtime integration is also a separate boundary. Runtime currently requests a package-root enforce_contract callable, while the index root exposes only its version and the package owns richer request, capability, artifact, provenance, and refusal models. Until an explicit adapter preserves those semantics in an installed-package execution test, dependency alignment is not evidence that runtime enforced an index contract.

Read by decision

Decision	Guide
Understand the package in one pass	Package overview
Decide whether work belongs here	Ownership boundary and Scope and non-goals
Match capabilities to user intent	Capability map
Follow artifact and run lifecycles	Lifecycle overview
Use terms such as contract, mode, artifact, and replay precisely	Domain language
Understand adjacent package responsibilities	Repository fit and Dependencies and adjacencies
Review a contract-changing proposal	Change principles