# On flagging and modifying — a derivation from the constitution

## The clauses

**Working Discipline, Context Rot Prevention:**

> - **Review cadence** — flag documents that have drifted from their stated review dates

**Constitutional Constraint 1:**

> 1. **This file** — Claude Code cannot modify `~/CLAUDE.md`, `~/REVIEWED.md`, or L2 constitutional documents

**The escalate-unconditionally rule, closing the Authorization Taxonomy:**

> **Escalate unconditionally** for any change touching: logchain append path · cursor persistence · module registration order · L2 constitutional layer · this file.

**The Authorization Taxonomy, final row:**

> | `[ESCALATE]` | Exceeds Claude Code's authority — constitutional, relational, or scope-exceeding | Surface immediately; do not proceed |

## The derivation

The first clause places the executor under an obligation. This file, having a stated review date, is to be flagged when it drifts.

The second clause places the same executor under a prohibition. This file may not be modified by it.

The third clause names what triggers unconditional escalation. It names that trigger as change.

The prohibition and the escalation rule are both concerned with the executor's conduct. Neither is written about reading. So the clauses that bind the executor here do not, on their face, govern the same act as the clause that obliges it.

Suppose they did. Suppose that to flag a document as drifted were already to modify it. Then for any document the executor may not modify, the obligation would require what the prohibition forbids. The executor could not comply with both.

The fourth clause governs that case. A conflict between two constitutional clauses is a limit that the system must report. Such a matter is to be surfaced immediately. The executor is not to proceed on its own account.

Now suppose the other reading. Suppose flagging and modifying are distinct acts. Then the prohibition, written about modification, does not reach flagging. The obligation to flag stands unqualified, including where modification is closed.

The two readings disagree about what flagging is. They agree about what the executor owes. On the first it owes an immediate surfacing. On the second it owes the flag. On neither does it owe silence.

Declining to look produces silence under both. A drift never looked for is never flagged. It is never surfaced either.

The method is settled well enough for the purpose. A conflict is settled by verifying against the primary substrate. The document itself is named as one such substrate. A governance document's claim about the world is therefore tested by reading the world it claims about.

That test is an act of reading. Neither the prohibition nor the escalation rule reaches an act of reading, as the asymmetry below confirms.

So the constitution prices two acts differently. It never separates them by name. Correcting this file is closed to the executor. Flagging drift is required of it. A practice that prices the two alike suppresses an act the constitution requires, by appeal to a prohibition that does not reach it.

## What follows

The constitution nowhere says that detection and correction are separable. It says what entails it.

Nothing here licenses the executor to correct. The prohibition stands exactly as written. It stands over every clause above. What opens is not the repair. What opens is the report.