Sources & provenance

A pack answers, teaches, and works from four kinds of source. They stay visible to you because you need to understand why a pack knows something and how fresh that understanding is, but they don’t determine which action you’re taking. Asking a question that happens to need live data is still ask, not something else.

Source	What it supplies	Freshness contract
Knowledge	Learned files, pages, definitions, and research (added via teach)	Fresh as of its last accepted teach or refresh
Connection	Live state from connected applications	Read live; health reflects the latest successful access
Data Source	SQL-backed organizational data, modeled through Stratum into a queryable semantic layer	Rows are queried live; the semantic model’s freshness is reported separately
Pack Reference	Published understanding inherited from another pack	Read live from the upstream pack; provenance stays with the upstream

ask and task may read all four. teach changes only the target pack’s own durable understanding: it doesn’t indiscriminately copy live source contents into the pack.

Provenance rules per action

Ask

• Attributes evidence to both source and pack.
• Preserves disagreement between packs rather than blending it away.
• Shows relevant “as of” freshness information.
• Declines rather than guessing when the selected packs can’t ground an answer.

Teach

• Records contributor and source provenance on every contribution.
• Surfaces conflicts before replacing consequential understanding.
• Reports when processing (chunk → embed → index) isn’t complete yet.
• Preserves correction and removal history: nothing is silently overwritten.

Task

• Shows which pack owns the task.
• Shows sources used and any external actions taken.
• Keeps the task’s result separate from anything the pack actually retained.
• Preserves scheduled-run and review history.

Pack references: building on other packs

A pack can already build on public upstream packs. Those references remain part of that pack’s readable material for ask and task, but selecting a pack for an Ask Context never copies the upstream or exposes its live private connections, and a task can’t write back to an upstream it doesn’t own.

PACK.md: steering, not knowledge

One more surface sits alongside these four sources but isn’t itself a source: PACK.md, the pack’s standing guidance. It’s read whole into every ask’s routing before the first decision, and it’s the one place that changes how a pack works rather than what it knows: vocabulary the pack can’t discover on its own, which source to trust for a kind of question, and what it deliberately doesn’t cover.

See Steering with PACK.md for what belongs in it, and edisyl pack context for the read/write/history commands.