Engineering programs produce artifacts.
Requirements, designs, hazard analyses, rationale notes. Each lives in its own system, in its own format. Each one is a partial view of the program.
Engineering programs produce artifacts. The reasoning behind them is supposed to survive — and rarely does. Here is the shape of the work.
Requirements, designs, hazard analyses, rationale notes. Each lives in its own system, in its own format. Each one is a partial view of the program.
The artifacts aren't the system. They are projections of it. The system exists in the relationships between them, and in the reasoning that connects them. That reasoning is what gets lost.
Reading SYS-041, SYS-042, SYS-043 about autopilot disengagement, the engineer assembles a picture: a control loop, the pilot, the autopilot's authority, the sensor feeding it. That picture isn't preserved. It has to be reconstructed every review cycle, by someone with enough context to do it.
A control structure built from the artifacts. SYS-041 constrains the autopilot's disengagement behavior. SYS-042 constrains the autopilot-to-pilot feedback channel. SYS-043 constrains the aircraft's controllability after disengagement. Each requirement now has a structural role.
The pilot's process model has a slot: what they need to believe to control the aircraft. After disengagement on bad airspeed, no requirement tells the pilot the airspeed is unreliable. The artifacts pass review individually. The model says they don't add up.
M45 shows the inferred role of each artifact, the slot in the model that's uncovered, and why the inference fired. The engineer accepts, refines, defers, or rejects. Every decision is recorded with its rationale and carried into the next iteration.
Each iteration starts where the last one left off. Decisions carry forward, deferred items stay open, the model grows, and what was once an inference becomes part of the project's working record.
We're talking with a small number of design partners: aerospace programs where the cost of misalignment is real. Not to demo, but to understand how reasoning gets lost in your specific program, and whether the way we're thinking about it would help.
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