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Charter — cheat-sheet

Requirements, traceability, and verification. Gold thread. Authority: ~/charter · briefing: members/charter.md

What it does

Charter is the federation's obligations system-of-record: it records what must be true, keeps accepted truth separate from proposed / inferred / stale / imported guesses (never collapsing them), tracks how each obligation is verified and when that evidence goes stale, and answers "what obligations does this change touch?"

It owns requirements, the trace-link ontology with authority + freshness states, immutable requirement versions, locked baselines, and verification records. It is a read-only consumer of its peers — it never assumes their authority.

Quick-start

Charter exposes a CLI for authoring obligations and a read-only MCP surface for agents consuming them.

charter create     # author a requirement / obligation
charter accept     # accept a proposed obligation into the baseline
charter baseline   # manage locked baselines
charter doctor     # health check

charter_requirement_dossier_get { id }   # the obligation dossier (current)
charter_project_context_get              # self-describing capability + authority
charter_baseline_get / charter_baseline_diff
charter_verification_status_get { id }   # how it is verified, and freshness

The MCP surface is the federation's reference envelope — {schema, ok, data|error, warnings, meta{producer, generated_at, project}} with closed error enums and a self-describing project_context.

How it composes

Charter states and tracks obligations whether peers are installed or not — with manual trace links and file/symbol refs in solo mode, and SEI-keyed links plus work / finding references when peers are present.

  • Charter → Loomweave — SEI consumer for trace links; marks links stale on lineage change, falls back to file/symbol refs when Loomweave is absent (contracts-index.md §10).
  • Charter → Legis — weft.charter.preflight_facts.v1 envelope feeds governance (contracts-index.md §9).
  • Charter ↔ Filigree / Wardline — requirement ⇄ work and finding ⇄ requirement trace links.

Federation adapters are pending

Charter's domain core and read-only MCP surface ship, but its federation adapters (the SEI consumer and the preflight_facts.v1 producer) remain designed-not-wired, so its matrix cells read planned. Status is a snapshot — see the briefing and the repo.

Snapshot — most-used commands & MCP verbs

snapshot 2026-06-06 — NOT authoritative here; see the repo

A curated subset, not the full surface. The requirement-identity model and trace ontology are Charter's authority. See ~/charter/README.md, ~/charter/docs/concept.md, and ~/charter/docs/architecture/decisions/.

Surface Verb Does
CLI charter create author a requirement / obligation
CLI charter accept accept a proposed obligation into the baseline
CLI charter baseline manage / lock baselines
MCP charter_requirement_dossier_get the obligation dossier (current)
MCP charter_project_context_get self-describing capability + authority
MCP charter_baseline_get / charter_baseline_diff baseline state / diff
MCP charter_verification_status_get verification status + freshness
MCP charter_trace_link_list trace links for a requirement

Pointers