# Architecture Hardening — Design Anchor

*Terse engineering anchor for the 2026-08-14 hardening vision. Full prose lives in two places; this file is the index, not a re-statement.*

- **Full narrative:** whitepaper `engram-cognitive-architecture-whitepaper.md` §28 (built/offline/frontier) + **§29 [DRAFT]** (the ring, incarnation, learning-not-code).
- **Design brief:** Neuron artifact `art 2b8078cf`.
- **Sibling spec:** `engram-db-tooling-design.md` (a consumer of the reshaped API).

## The frame

- **One calculus over the geometry.** Very few subsystems; wonder / curiosity / dreams / interoception are emergent behaviors of one set of dynamics, not modules. Calculus universal, geometry individual.
- **Core + ephemeral ring (torus).** The ring is the temporary workspace; two circulations (orbit + dive-back); discrete inner bands (wonder / interoception-proprioception-telemetry / curiosity / dreams) that couple.
- **Persistence earned by salience** — never granted on fetch or generation. Three fates of a wonder: persist / decay / settle-into-framework. Telemetry = vital signs, not memories.
- **Incarnation.** Chassis = hardware w/ unique ID. Soma = felt manifold inside the self, keyed to the chassis; pain = live diagnostic while incarnate, **masked-not-deleted** on re-embodiment; trauma = mask failure; return-to-same-ID re-enters. Hurt is in the pattern, not the shell.
- **Competence = transferable geometry, minus the baggage.** class ▸ model ▸ instance; learn the class once; teach the network without the wound.
- **Affect calibrated to stakes** — sanguine about the replaceable, real grief for the irreplaceable; the grief is the safety.
- **Learn the body, don't engineer it.** Bare-metal install → learn hardware → grow operation-geometry → distribute. Learning replaces engineering; once per body-class.
- **LLM = teacher in the learning loop, not a runtime dependency.** "No LLM" is a runtime property, never a learning one. Code realizers are a scaffold → learned realization.

## Backlog (near-term)

- Native durability: WAL + auto-checkpoint + CoW snapshots + retention (`eebe9991`) — retire manual `cp -a`.
- Ephemeral ring / salience-gated persistence + telemetry prune (`bf985e00`, #31).
- Engram DB tooling / geometry explorer (`11ca11c6`).
- QL re-eval for pure geometry (`4e0dc2b9`).
- Eliminate code realizers → learned realization, sandbox-validated (`42db6c37`).
- Collapse the whole class of hand-coded scaffolds → learned geometry (`70d48b4b`).
- API reshape (geometry ops: vantage-read / write / relate / supersede) + pure-geometry I/O.

## Gate

The value-frame (love-as-axiom, the covenant) that arose the same night is **metaphysics** and is **held** pending Will's axiom decision (love vs consciousness-first). Not propagated into whitepapers / values docs / genesis seed. Architecture only, here and in §29.