Personal jurisprudence — user-level precedent that follows you between repos

[SUaDtL]

Personal jurisprudence — your case law follows you between repos

Horizon idea logged from a full-repo review session — concept capture, not a spec.

Depends on #248 (precedent engine) — this is the user-global layer on top of per-repo precedent; it has no meaning until repo-level precedent exists.

The gap

Every arbiter repo is an island: decision log, precedents, lens-weights all die at the repo boundary. But the core user is a solo dev with many projects, and the most valuable thing they own is the scar tissue — the approach that bit them in project 3, the ruling they superseded in shame in project 7, the tie they've now broken the same way four times. Arbiter watches the same lesson get learned in every repo, separately, with total amnesia. Meanwhile ~/.codearbiter/ already exists as a user-global store — today it holds a token ledger and a prune log.

Concept

An opt-in user-level layer of precedent, consulted when the repo's own record is thin:

• When decision-variance finds Precedent: none on record — which is every young repo, exactly when guidance matters most — the court consults the personal layer: "no precedent in this repo; your personal record shows this tie broken toward Maintainable in 3 of 4 projects — persuasive, not binding."
• Authority hierarchy (the load-bearing design rule): repo precedent > personal precedent, and personal precedent is persuasive, never binding — a project can explicitly rule against the user's habit, and that divergence is itself logged and becomes part of the record.
• /ca:init seeds a brand-new repo with the user's accumulated jurisprudence as reference authority instead of a blank docket. Day one, the court already knows who you are.

Why it's cheap

It's #248 with one more layer in the lookup order, over a directory that already exists. All local, all the user's own data, zero privacy surface, no infrastructure. Stdlib-only per ADR 0004.

Why it matters

• Solo-dev-first: pays for itself for a single user with two repos.
• Inverts the tool relationship: every dev tool forgets you between projects; this makes a career a queryable asset.
• Quietly the first rung of a ladder — personal → team → community jurisprudence is one mechanic at three scales. The later rungs (deliberately out of scope) only make sense if adoption grows; this rung doesn't wait for that.

Design cautions

• Opt-in, and inspectable: /ca:precedent --personal should show exactly what the global layer knows, and it must be editable/prunable — it's the user's own record, not surveillance.
• The thin-history rule carries over per layer: fewer than 3 relevant personal entries → no pattern claimed.
• Cross-repo relevance matching is the hard judgment (a decision about a Django monolith is weak authority for an embedded project) — bias toward under-claiming relevance.
• Never copy repo-confidential detail into the global store — the personal layer stores the shape of rulings (subject, lenses, direction, strength), not project content.

Related

• Depends on Precedent engine: arbiter learns and cites your own jurisprudence #248 (precedent engine — the per-repo layer this extends)
• /ca:discovery — evidentiary hearings: the court runs its own experiments #252 /ca:discovery (exhibits strengthen the personal record's authority)
• Stage graduation nudges — observed-signal suggestions for stage transitions #251 stage graduation nudges (same evidence-then-bless spirit at user scope)
• Behavior profiles: tunable orchestration depth + a prototyping lane #247 behavior profiles (a personal record could eventually seed profile defaults for new repos)