# The honesty rule this ledger holds itself to

`design/` describes what AILang **is now**: schema, semantics,
invariants, runtime contracts. It is present-tense by construction.
Two things never belong in a contract or model file:

- **Forward intent** (anything stated as planned, intended, or
  expected of a future iteration rather than true today) — that
  lives in the Gitea issue backlog.
- **History and rationale** (how a prior draft read, what changed
  since, why one option was chosen, why another was rejected, what
  was dropped in some iteration) — that lives in `git log` (iter
  and audit commit bodies). Decision-records are commit-body
  content, not ledger content; this is the honesty rule it holds
  itself to.

A cross-reference that does belong stays: it is a formal,
file-relative Markdown link into the durable tier (`design/` or
source), enforced by the body-link durability gate in
[`design_index_pin.rs`](../../crates/ailang-core/tests/design_index_pin.rs).
A reference that cannot be expressed as such a link is, by that
fact, the history-or-rationale prose the rule above removes.

The single legitimate exception is a present-tense reserved or
deliberately-excluded claim that is explicitly and correctly
labelled. The discriminator is not whether a sentence mentions past
or future, but whether the document asserts something exists, works, or changed that does not.

Ratified by: `crates/ailang-core/tests/docs_honesty_pin.rs`.