Governing principle
The decision that precedes every other
A prompt is a request submitted to a probabilistic system. The governing principle is a prior authorship: a decision about who the system is for, how it should respond, and what it must never do. Without it, generation converges on the probable. With it, generation is constrained to the governed. The governing principle is not generated — it is authored.
All perspectives
Four decisions that made the governing layer invisible
The decision that precedes every other
How an engineering choice became a design assumption
Slop predates AI by thirty years
Your content reaches everyone the same way
A thirty-year-old method the design field never named
Any AI can convert a design document into a Catenator specification
Structured content and the governance argument