Recording decisions

ActionsArtifactVerification

Task and place

A decision record captures a choice the act text alone cannot settle, so a later reader inherits the reasoning instead of redoing it. This stage sits after construct choice and before review: inventory and construct choice flag the close calls, records settle them, and review reads the records alongside the rules.

Inputs

• The close calls flagged by inventory and construct choice: tariff shape, payout bound, penalty rounding, and the premium base in the running example.
• The decision record template.
• The filled examples: the EAI tariff decision, the EAI threshold decision, the EAI penalty decision, and the EAI premium-base decision.

Actions

• Record what a later reader cannot re-derive: construct choices among close neighbors, boundary readings, and policies for act silence such as rounding.
• Do not record direct transcription: rule text that follows the act word for word needs a source label, not a record.
• For each record, state the question, list the options with their costs, take a position, justify it from the act and the machine behavior, and — for a semantic choice — name the test that breaks if the position flips. A choice of representation between semantically equivalent forms gets no such test: no scenario can fail a correct decision table while passing identical strict rules, so the record judges the form by traceability, maintenance, and diagnostics instead.
• Link each record to the rules and tests it governs, and reopen it when the cited article changes.

Decisions

The stage’s own decision is which items earn records. In the running example four items qualify: the tariff shape (EAI-D1), the payout bound (EAI-D2), the penalty rounding policy (EAI-D3), and the premium base (EAI-D4). Everything else in the modeled articles transcribes directly and needs only source labels.

Artifact

The artifact is one record per close call, with fields following the decision record template: record id, status, context, question, options considered, position, justification, distinguishing scenario, assumptions, consequences, open questions, and review.

EAI-D1, tariff as twenty-two strict rules. Status: accepted. Context: Article Seventeen pairs twenty-two risk classes with rates from 0.12 percent to 2.96 percent, and the premium base multiplies the insured sum by the rate (amended from payroll by finding EAI-R3; see EAI-D4). Question: one decision table or twenty-two strict rules? Options considered: a decision table routing class to rate under a uniqueness policy, or twenty-two strict rules each guarded by one class. Position: twenty-two strict rules. Justification: each class-rate pair carries its own source label, so a wrong row fails and reads alone; strict fits because the article admits no exceptions; the premium computation stays a separate rule reading the derived tariff. Consequences: adding a class means adding a rule, and each row owns its premium check — removing the class-7 rule fails exactly the class-7 check. This is a representation choice: an equivalent decision table would pass the same suite, so no test prefers the rules; the record prefers them for per-row labels and per-row failures. Filled form: the EAI tariff decision.

Non-runnable sketch: the rejected decision-table form, shown for contrast only; never checked or tested.

Arxo Law

decision TariffByClass(risk: Integer) -> Decimal {
    table hit unique {
        when risk == 1 => 0.0012;
        otherwise => 0.0296;
    }
}

EAI-D2, inclusive thirty boundary. Status: accepted. Context: Article Nineteen conditions payout on capacity loss from thirty to one hundred percent. Question: inclusive or exclusive bounds? Options considered: inclusive at both ends, exclusive lower bound, exclusive upper bound. Position: inclusive at both ends. Justification: the act’s range wording gives no exception at either end, and the strict rule then stays silent outside the range instead of denying. Consequences: thirty percent qualifies while twenty-nine does not, one hundred qualifies while one hundred one stays silent — and each end owns its pair of tests, because the lower pair alone never exercised the upper bound. Filled form: the EAI threshold decision.

EAI-D3, no rounding policy. Status: accepted. Context: Article Nine sets the penalty at one and a half percent of the unpaid sum per day of delay, with no rounding instruction. Question: round the penalty, and if so how? Options considered: the exact product, or rounding to whole currency units. Position: the exact product, with no rounding step. Justification: any rounding rule would be authorial invention; the act states a plain product, and the package computes unpaid times 0.015 times days exactly. Distinguishing scenario: the fractional probe — one hundred unpaid over one day yields exactly 1.5 KZT, and smuggling round(…, 0, "HALF_UP") into the rule fails exactly that probe while the round-figure check still passes. Assumptions: exact engine arithmetic, unrounded amounts acceptable downstream. Consequences: downstream readers see unrounded amounts; revisit this record if the act or a regulator instruction adds a rounding rule. Filled form: the EAI penalty decision.

EAI-D4, premium base is tariff times insured sum with the minimum floor. Status: accepted. Context: Article Seventeen point 1 multiplies the tariff by the contract insured sum, point 2-1 raises a below-floor base to the minimum wage, and Article Sixteen point 1 sets the sum at or above payroll without ever equating them. Question: payroll times rate, or insured sum times rate with the floor? Position: the base reads the insured sum from the case; the due premium is the base at or above the case-supplied wage, else the wage. Justification: each norm maps to one rule with its own source label, and the two premium rules split the input space on a single comparison. Distinguishing scenario: payroll one million with insured sum two million answers 59200 (the old payroll reading answered 29600); the floor and boundary probes pin the minimum branch from both sides. Assumptions: the insured sum arrives from the case, S ≥ F is assumed rather than enforced, and the wage figure is case input with no pinned statutory value. Filled form: the EAI premium-base decision.

Worked example

The four records read against the candidate suite as follows. The tariff record trips row by row: an insured sum of one million at rate 0.0296 yields twenty-nine thousand six hundred for class twenty-two, and every other class owns the same shape of check with its expectation derived from the source percent. The threshold record trips on two boundary pairs, thirty against twenty-nine and one hundred against one hundred one. The rounding record trips on the fractional probe: one hundred unpaid over one day yields exactly 1.5 KZT, with no rounding step in the rule. The premium-base record trips on sum-versus-payroll: the same million of payroll with a doubled insured sum answers fifty-nine thousand two hundred. Observed on the accepted candidate with the pinned tool (law 0.1.0, semantics law.core/0.2, published build):

Output

  ok   [kz.corpus.employee_accident_insurance#authored] tests/bounds.lawtest / EAI-LOSS-100-QUALIFIES
  ok   [kz.corpus.employee_accident_insurance#authored] tests/bounds.lawtest / EAI-LOSS-101-SILENT
  ok   [kz.corpus.employee_accident_insurance#authored] tests/penalty-fractional.lawtest / EAI-PENALTY-FRACTIONAL-EXACT

Pitfall

Two failures bracket this stage. Recording nothing leaves the next reader to reopen every close call from scratch. Recording everything buries transcription under process paper. The test is simple: if the act text plus the rules answer the question, no record; if two competent readers could differ, write one. A semantic record without a named tripwire test rots first; a representation record without named traceability grounds never stood up.

Verification

The stage is done when every semantic record names the tripwire failures its fault must produce, the representation record names its traceability grounds, and the candidate suite passes thirty-seven of thirty-seven. Criterion per record: flip the position in a scratch copy and watch the expected failures arrive — every failure explained by the broken requirement, and any unexpected failure investigated on its own. A lone failing test is the special case of an isolated probe (the class-7 row removal, the floor-rule removal), not the general rule: the >= 30 → > 30 weakening trips three independent checks for one requirement, and that is healthy overlap. The boundary excerpt above is the tripwire evidence for EAI-D2; the per-row tariff checks are the tripwires for EAI-D1’s rows (the rule-vs-table form itself has no failing test by design); the fractional probe is the tripwire for EAI-D3; the sum-distinguishes probe is the tripwire for EAI-D4. The source seven-of-seven measures the snapshot, not the records.

Limits

Records explain; they prove nothing about the act. An amended article reopens every record citing it, and a record never overrides the pinned text. When the act and a record disagree, the act wins and the record is rewritten.

Next step

Continue with Absence, negation, and conflict, which turns boundary readings into explicit policies for every relation.

Sources

• Tutorials — the worked drills behind vocabulary, constructs, and checks.
• Language reference — syntax and semantics of every construct.
• Command line — the check and test commands used above.
• Vocabulary first and Choosing a construct — the previous stages.