In the next release

These changes are on main and ship in the release after v1.1.0. With v1.1.0, which is what the installer gives you today, the loop works as the rest of this documentation describes; nothing here is needed to use it.

A pre-release, v1.2.0-rc.1, carries these changes for people who want them now; the stable channel stays on v1.1.0:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/Ragosorio/Rationale/releases/download/v1.2.0-rc.1/rationale-installer.sh | RATIONALE_VERSION=v1.2.0-rc.1 sh

Update it with RATIONALE_CHANNEL=preview rationale update; a plain rationale update goes back to v1.1.0.

The context an agent receives

• Only current rules are authority. Records that were superseded, revoked, or retired are listed under history with their status and replacement, and explain_target(target, include_history=true) returns their text. An agent is never handed a replaced decision next to its replacement.
• The scope is the one you asked for. A symbol query returns what is bound to that symbol plus file-wide rules; a file query everything bound in the file; a folder query the Records bound inside it, by priority. A symbol new on your branch is bound to itself, not to its whole file, even when the structural index does not know it yet.
• Every answer says what it is. retrieval.status is found, none_found, index_incomplete, or target_missing; each Record says why it is there. Structure the working tree no longer has is dropped as a stale index.
• Invariants cross modules along real calls. A critical, high, or pinned constraint of the code your target calls arrives as an inherited constraint, with the call that brought it.
• The budget covers the whole response. What did not fit is listed in omitted, with the call that returns it. Rules that govern are never cut.

Keeping the canon true

rationale operations                                  # prepared changes nobody closed
rationale doctor --update-baseline && rationale doctor --check   # CI that fails only on new problems
rationale retire src/legacy --reason "Replaced by src/notifications"   # plan; --apply to write, --undo to revert
rationale rule add constraint "Amounts are integer cents." --why "…" --bind src/billing --pin

Agents close operations with finalize_change, or with abandon=true when the change did not happen. In Claude Code, install-agent adds hooks that recover context at the start of a session, remind before editing a governed file, and ask once to close an operation the session left open; they never block an edit.

Evidence

Rationale now ships an evaluation (eval/ in the repository) that runs any binary against an invented project reproducing reported failure modes. On it, v1.1.0 passed 1 of 15 retrieval scenarios and this release passes 15; Records that were superseded or revoked and served as current went from 7 to 0, and Records of another symbol from 3 to 0. These are synthetic results.

On Rationale’s own repository, with the real structural provider, the median estimated response went from 3,068 to 2,370 tokens and the targets over the default budget from 10 of 12 to 2 (both declared overflows of governing rules), with no latency regression in an interleaved comparison. The full record, including what was not verified, is in the repository’s docs/work-items/context-integrity-1.2.md.