The contracts

Two things bind kernel 0.1.0’s wire. The schemas under contracts/v0 are the constitution’s product: sacred, changed only on the project owner’s word. The conformance fixtures under spine/conformance are the living contract between the Rust kernel and the Python reference: language-neutral files of cases — given this input, expect these bytes, this hash, or this refusal by name — that both kernels pass unchanged. A module is “ported” only when the Rust kernel passes its fixture, the same file, unchanged.

The schemas the kernel exercises today

Schema	What it shapes	Where it is felt
capability-token.schema.json	A seat or a lease: subject · audience · grants · constraints (expiry, direction, a body’s budget) · chain · sig. Attenuation-only.	Every seat the kernel mints validates against it; every lease too.
common.schema.json	DID · content hash · signature · scope path · space · budget · time window.	The DID pattern was widened for did:orreth:person:‹name›.
join.schema.json	The join spectrum, the lease terms.	The desk’s five statuses carry its law.

The remaining v0 schemas — memory record, skill standard, identity and attachment, retrieval, pruning policy, tier profile, signed record, run record, escalation, factory, agent surface, resolved context, universe template — are the design-phase constitution (docs/design/0000–0017). They still bind; the organs that exercise them on this kernel are re-seated or owed, and what works today says which.

The conformance fixtures

Fixture	What it pins
envelope-v0	The transport envelope’s canonical bytes, content hash, required fields, refusals by name.
schema-v0	The ground’s schema version and its forty tables.
rails-v0	The names and shapes both kernels share on the rails.
inbox-v0	Parking a poison event and advancing past it.
askroad-v0 · ask-v0	The ask road: the ask’s row, its journey, its reply, the kind read from the words.
loops-v0	The beats: the scheduler’s tick, the intent rail’s turn, the beat lock.
bodies-v0	The park law (three deaths in five minutes), the backoff, the harness’s command.
desk-v0	Every transition of the join desk, the challenge’s and the collect’s bytes, the lease’s exact bytes with the fuel clause.
seat-v0	The seat token’s bytes from a seed; the verdicts in fence order — expired, foreign authority, broken chain, bad signature, amplified; the doors’ needs; the origin; the person grammar.
proof-v0	The proof ladder: L1 · L2 · L3, the hold’s words.
mitl-v0	Summoning, dismissing, the impact door.
markers-v0	The registry, the structural seed, the tree under a marker.
intent-v0	The intention record, declare, stop, the loop’s turn.
levers-v0	The lever catalogue and the remediation rail’s outcomes.
watch-v0	The twenty-two metrics in one order; a watch turning red and green.
tools-v0	The tool manifest by name and bytes; the held-by rule.
services-v0 · mcp-v0 · minds-v0	The shelf’s ladder; the MCP client’s three calls; the Stable’s deals, pins and confessed degrade.
memory-v0	The Record’s landing, recall, the purge’s tombstone.
profile-v0	The person’s own words with their labels, newest wins, a withdrawal.
placement-v0	Placement as policy: cell, metal, affinity, a refusal at birth with its reason.
cells-v0	Cells, the seam through every fence, routing home, partition, the stop, re-homing and the epoch.
export-v0	The compliance export’s hash chain and signature.
doors-v0	Every door’s name, its clock, the pool.

The Rust runner (cargo test -p orreth-spine --test conformance) reads every fixture and reports its count: 730 cases across the twenty-six at 0.1.0, not yet ported: none. The reference’s tests/test_conformance.py runs the same files on every change. A fixture the reference fails is a fixture bug or a wound — never silently regenerated.

The canonical bytes

The one rule beneath every fixture: canonical bytes are the contract. Both kernels serialize a message with sorted keys, no whitespace, \uXXXX escapes and a float representation written by hand rather than trusted to a library, so the same message is the same bytes everywhere — and the same content hash. The seat’s signature, the lease’s, the seam’s and the export’s all stand on it.