Factory Logs
A Revised Goal Must Keep Its History
Changing the work should create a new accountable version, not let old evidence answer a new question.
A revised goal is not a cosmetic edit. If the desired outcome, evidence requirement, authority, or success condition changes, the system is doing different work.
The hard part is preserving that fact without making the work lose its identity.
Current state
WTK uses governed goals to define what an agent or team is meant to achieve and how its result will later be evaluated. Feedback can help identify where that definition needs to change, but feedback should not rewrite a completed verdict.
Before this cycle, a material revision could make the next build harder to connect to the package that had already been under review.
Changes
WTK now preserves a durable package identity while recording a material goal change as a new governed version. The prior candidate, run, and evaluation evidence do not become evidence for the revised work.
The new version carries forward the history needed to explain what changed. The resulting package can retain portable provenance about the goal version that shaped it, without exposing local working details.
Feedback follows the same boundary. It can become candidate guidance when the goal remains the same. When it changes the success contract, scope, ranking, authority, or evidence requirement, WTK requires an explicit revised goal before rebuilding.
A newly selected evidence capability follows this path too. The system does not quietly edit the generated package and pretend that the old evidence answered the new request.
Failures observed
This change addresses several forms of continuity loss:
- a material goal change appearing to be a routine package update;
- old evaluation evidence supporting work defined by a newer goal;
- feedback changing the meaning of success without a visible decision;
- a revised build losing the connection to the work it replaced;
- a package version being mistaken for the version of the goal it serves.
Assumptions removed
We no longer assume that package identity and goal version mean the same thing.
We no longer assume that a revised goal may inherit an earlier result.
We no longer assume that useful feedback can bypass the decision to redefine success.
Evidence boundary
WTK can represent material goal revisions, preserve package continuity, and keep earlier derived evidence from silently supporting a later goal version.
That does not establish that goal-derived evaluation remains useful across every model, harness, team shape, or long-running improvement cycle. It also does not establish that people will make the right revision decision in ambiguous cases.
Research question advanced
This cycle advances the question of whether a governed goal can remain measurable through qualification and improvement. It supplies bounded mechanism evidence that a changed goal can remain connected to its history without allowing earlier evidence to answer the changed question.
Next hypothesis
The next test will hold the package identity stable while changing one material goal condition at a time across multiple execution forms. The resulting records should remain traceable to the exact goal version that defined them, and no stale evidence should satisfy the revised evaluation.