06 The specification s anchors

06 · The specification's anchors

The specification carries with it a few further anchors, minor in form but functional in substance. The first is a glossary: the explicit fixing of the meaning of terms in the context of the work. A language model, faced with a word that admits several legitimate senses, tends to slide among them from one step to the next — using "actor", "log" or "session" now in one sense now in another, all admissible in the abstract but not all correct in context. The literature recognises this sliding as semantic drift and points to a cause: in the absence of an explicit anchor, the model infers the sense of terms from statistical co-occurrence patterns rather than from an authoritative definition. Declaring once that, here, a term means this and not that removes the ambiguity at the root and binds all the actors — humans and models — to the same vocabulary.

The second anchor is a register of references: the links to external sources, materials and documents, fixed in the specification once retrieved. It serves a practical and recurring problem: what the model found once does not remain available at the next step, and without an explicit anchor it would be searched for again from scratch — with the cost, and the risk of different outcomes, of every fresh retrieval. Recording the source in the document makes it a fixed point, citable and findable, instead of a retrieval to be repeated. It is the same principle research calls provenance: every claim traces back to the source it comes from, so that it can be verified rather than guessed anew. These two anchors, together with the pragmatic evidence from which the method derived them, find confirmation in a literature that documents the domain glossary and the register of sources as effective correctives of real model drifts.

A third anchor concerns not what the specification says, but how it changes: the tracking of changes between versions. The document records not only the current state, but what changed from one version to the next and why. It is the natural extension of the living-document principle: as the decision retains its own rationale, so the specification retains the history of its own transformations. And it answers the same tendency of the model to return unwittingly over its own steps — a tracked change is a change that will not be undone without anyone noticing.

Glossary, references and tracking complete a picture that, at this point, has a recognisable shape. Objectives and scope, open points, decisions, glossary, sources, version history: these are all artefacts with a kindred purpose — to remember — but of a different nature from the implicit memory of a model or a person. They are an explicit functional memory: written, versioned, and above all legible and verifiable by humans and by the language models that operate on them alike. Where a model's memory is volatile and opaque, and a person's is limited and private, these artefacts are persistent, shared and inspectable. The method, in the end, does nothing but deliberately build this common memory, one artefact at a time.

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