Epistemic weight is the amount of decisional force an idea has accumulated during a working session. It is not a fixed property assigned at birth. It is something that changes — across turns, across citations, across reformulations — as material moves through the conversation.Documentation Index
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Weight is in motion
An idea does not become a decision at a single moment. It gains weight gradually. A proposal gets mentioned once, then cited as a reason, then embedded in a draft as an assumption, then used to rule out an alternative. At no point did anyone say “yes, this is decided.” But by the end of that chain, the idea is behaving like a crystallized decision. That trajectory — not the moment of first appearance — is what Shaping Frame tracks. This is why the skill operates every turn, not just at write time. Weight shifts continuously. An element that was safely in the fan at the start of a session may have crossed two thresholds by the middle of it.The danger: silent accumulation
The most common failure mode is not a bad decision made deliberately — it is a decision that was never made at all, but started being treated as one. Material accumulates weight silently: it gets repeated without objection, used as the foundation of the next proposal, incorporated into a draft. No one approved it. But no one stopped it either. It crystallized by inertia. Shaping Frame exists to make silent accumulation visible. When material starts behaving like a decision without ever being explicitly approved, the frame surfaces it and forces a real choice.Two axes: source and state
Tracking weight requires two coordinates simultaneously. Source — where did this material come from? A statement from the operator, a hypothesis Claude generated in-session, an external document, a model prior, a filesystem read. Provenance determines default weight and who has authority to crystallize it. State — how far along is this material toward crystallization? Is it a raw intuition that surfaced once? A candidate in an open fan? Something that has been cited repeatedly without approval? Something explicitly approved? Something discarded but at risk of drifting back in? Both axes matter independently. A Claude-generated proposal and an operator-stated constraint may be at the same state — both currently Candidate — but they carry very different weight and require very different handling. Promoting one is a routine step; promoting the other is the operator’s exclusive call.The correct mental model for Shaping Frame is:Element → current weight → movement → threshold → decision neededNot: “static source → fixed category → automatic decision.”Source determines default weight and authority, not destiny. An idea’s weight lives in its current position in the conversation, not in where it came from.
Where to go next
- Source Classes — the five provenance categories (OP, EXT, AI, MP, DSK), their default weights, and the authority each carries over decisions.
- Weight States — the five primary states an element can occupy and the three transversal flags that modify them, with rules for promotion and demotion.