What stays fixed is how it changes

Working with AI is a system with two bodies in it, the person and the AI, and both of them keep changing. Three things are true of that system. An AI starts each session from zero, or from a summary you never agreed to. The work doesn't start over. A person can hold only a few things in mind at once. And the work, the person and the models all keep changing, so the right ways of working change with them.

Two bodies that both keep changing need a layer between them that holds them together. Allostatik is that layer: the relationship between you and AI, written down in a form both of you can read. It keeps the work, and the way the two of you work together, so each session starts further along than the last. A session is the only time the two of you are both present.

What stays fixed is how it changes.

Something has to carry the work between sessions, and only the person can be trusted to own it. So it lives in plain files the person can read and change. What's carried can fail in five ways: it gets lost, it goes stale, it grows too heavy to read, it never gets integrated into the system, or it was wrong when it was written.

Because everything keeps changing, nothing about what is held can be fixed. What can be fixed is how things change: who decides, what gets kept, what gets checked, and when the rules themselves get questioned.

That comes to seven rules, and each one carries a check, because a rule without a cheap test decorates rather than constrains. The checks use a few working names. A session has an open and a close. At the open, every copy a tool reads, a pasted settings field, a loaded file, is compared against the file it was copied from; that file is the source, and the comparison is the drift-check. At the close, what changed is written back. The queue is the decisions waiting for you. And each time the same correction comes back, that is one firing.

1. The AI proposes; the person decides. Every change that matters carries the person's ruling and the reason for it. Check: every change at a close traces to an approved goal or a ruling.
2. A change is finished only when it's written down where the next session will look. Check: a reader new to the project, given the files in any tool, states the goal the last close recorded.
3. Nothing is lost silently. What gets trimmed leaves a pointer, and the past stays reachable. Check: version history.
4. Nothing is trusted unchecked. What steers the work is compared against its source before it's used. Check: the drift-check at the open.
5. What must be read stays small, for a session at its start and for the person at a decision. Growth is paid for only by those who use it. Check: the open's load and the queue waiting for you, each against its current limit; neither grows when an unused feature ships.
6. A correction that keeps coming back questions the rule itself, these rules included. Check: three firings of one observation produce a proposal and a ruling.
7. A change counts only once both of you have seen it. A change made by one of you alone is not yet agreed, and the other finds out at the next open. Check: at the open, everything that changed since the last close is listed, and each change is owned by whoever made it.

Everything else — files, steps, scripts, tasks, threads — may grow, change or be trimmed, as long as these seven hold.

How it maps to the first principles: the first truth gives rules 2 and 3, the second gives rule 5, and the third gives rules 4 and 6. Owning the work gives rule 1, and meeting only in a session gives rule 7. The five ways a record fails line up with the first five rules: wrong when written is rule 1, never integrated is rule 2, lost is rule 3, stale is rule 4, too heavy is rule 5. Where the person sits in that first rule is the subject of where the human belongs; where the files sit is where Allostatik sits.

Bigger context windows and memory features treat working with an AI across time as a model problem. Prompt guides treat it as a content problem, what to put in. These rules treat it as neither: they say nothing about what is held, only how what is held changes.

Rule 6 includes itself, so even these rules can change. That's allostasis: the set point moves, by your ruling, with the reason recorded.

Two limits.

A check is worth only as much as the times it actually runs. Rule 3's check is the record itself. The other six are reads, by the AI or by you, and a read that depends on someone remembering to do it can stop happening.

And rule 6's threshold of three was chosen, not measured: enough to rule out noise, small enough to act on. It stands until a correction to it comes back three times.