The Grounding Map

The plaque makes a bold claim — every name is real — and the grounding map is where that claim is redeemed. It is the course's evidence ledger, kept in echd.roadmap.md: every module, verb, key, and port named on any page resolves to an artifact on disk, cited at the file level. A claim the map cannot trace is not a claim; it is a wish, and it does not ship. Where a composition is not finished, the map marks the row ◐ and names the rung that finishes it — present tense on the page, build state in the map, never blurred.

And there is one row in amber: secrets are not superseded, and the course says so plainly. That row is the register's collateral — a course that can show you exactly where it stops is a course you can believe about everywhere it does not. The map is only half the discipline, though. The other half is that none of it is kept by hand: a gate runner reads every built page and refuses the ones that break the contract. Trust is a file path, and the gate is what makes the file path binding.

The grounding contract is checked by two runners the course owns. The static one, toolkit/gate.py, reads every built page and grades it on the ten cms gates (containers · svg · no-future · voice · storage · motion · degrade · links · pager · refs) plus two laws of this course: schema — no ASCII schema block, because the figure is the schema — and clean-render, which fails any page that leaked raw markdown to the reader: an unrendered emphasis mark, a broken link, a stray citation bracket. It skips the M-era seed pages and resolves every sibling-course link, so a green run means every claim on the page is traceable and every mark is rendered.

The second runner, toolkit/probe_figures.js, drives a real browser: it measures each figure's geometry and performs the bidirectional-hover pass, so the page's schema is proven to work, not merely to exist. Between them, the two runners turn the plaque's promise into a build-time fact. This is the point of the whole reading protocol: the register is a claim, the map is the evidence, and the gate is what makes the evidence binding — honesty a course can prove rather than ask you to take on faith.

The grounding rule — trust is a file path, and the gate enforces it. Every claim traces to an artifact, every vision-claim names its rung, and the one gap stands in amber — and none of it is kept by hand. A claim the gate cannot trace is a wish; a course that cannot show its gap cannot be trusted about the rest.