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Earned Canonization

In Lambo, a concept does not become permanent because an agent marked it important. Concepts must earn promotion through structural evidence and recurrence across distinct sessions.

The Promotion Pipeline

Concepts progress through three sequential promotion gates:

flowchart LR
    New["New Concept<br/>(Derived)"] --> Gate1["1. Candidate Gate<br/>(Score > 90th percentile, 3 GC sweeps)"]
    Gate1 --> Gate2["2. Venerable Gate<br/>(3+ distinct interactions, 0.3 temporal span)"]
    Gate2 --> Gate3["3. Canonical Gate<br/>(Blast radius > 5, cooldown clear)"]
    Gate3 --> Canon["Canonical Fact<br/>(Surfaces as load-bearing warning)"]

1. Candidate Gate

To become a Candidate, a concept must:

  • Survive at least 3 background garbage collection sweeps.
  • Score strictly above the 90th percentile of its non-canonical peers.

The threshold uses nearest-rank percentile scoring against real peer scores rather than artificial constants.

2. Venerable Gate

To advance from Candidate to Venerable, a concept must demonstrate temporal breadth:

  • Accumulate at least 3 inbound structural edges from distinct origin interactions.
  • Cover at least 0.3 of the session’s total temporal extent.
  • Edges younger than 60 seconds do not count toward temporal spread.

3. Canonical Gate

To achieve Canonical status, a concept must demonstrate architectural weight:

  • Possess a structural blast radius strictly greater than 5.
  • Remain outside the 300-second re-promotion cooldown to prevent flapping oscillations.

Every promotion writes an immutable audit row to the database.

The Event-Time Clock

Promotion requires evidence across distinct sessions over time.

During bulk repository ingestion, years of commit history can be loaded in an hour. If promotion gates measured wall-clock flush time, a decade of engineering decisions would appear as a single afternoon.

Lambo addresses this with an injectable event clock:

  • Clients pass an optional event_time (such as git commit author date or file modification timestamp).
  • Lambo measures temporal extent and recurrence using event_time.
  • created_at remains server-stamped to preserve security boundaries.

Auditability

Promotion events generate permanent log records:

  • Timestamp and previous gate status.
  • Exact composite score and percentile values.
  • Blast radius and contributing edge IDs.

Read the Lambo Canonization guide for mathematical proofs and benchmark transcripts.