Source Engineering -- Foundations

The discipline's intellectual home. Definition, principles, terminology, scope and non-goals.

This repository holds the discipline's definition: what Source Engineering is, what it is not, the three principles it stands on, the open questions it is closing, and the explicit positioning against adjacent disciplines. Every other aspect repo derives its legitimacy from this one.

What is in this repository

• docs/00-manifesto.md -- the canonical manifesto. The "why this exists" arc, the three principles, the COTS contract, the contributor principles, the open questions.
• docs/05-positioning.md -- the explicit positioning matrix against eleven adjacent disciplines (ML/alignment, prompt engineering, context engineering, CoT/X-of-Thought, model-side XAI, MLOps, agent frameworks, observability, RAG, OpenDEAM/ECF, trust-by-policy).
• terminology.md -- the discipline's working vocabulary. Terms like COTS, hesitation factor, judgment gap, evidence-anchored, provenance-as-response, and the layer names.

Provenance

The content in this repository was developed following two essays:

• Source Engineering: Grounding AI-based Decisions with Integrity (December 2025) -- introduces the five pillars and the hesitation factor.
• Reframing the Five Pillars, One Year Later (October 2026) -- reframes the five pillars into a four-layer stack and identifies the judgment gap.

The original monorepo home for this content is now retired. The discipline's primary working repository is Source-Engineering/project-governance, which holds the change process, the ROADMAP, and the WBS epics.

How to engage

• Read the manifesto first. Start at docs/00-manifesto.md.
• Then the positioning matrix. docs/05-positioning.md answers "isn't this just X?" for every adjacent discipline.
• Then the terminology. terminology.md gives you the working vocabulary.
• Propose changes through the change process in Source-Engineering/source-engineering-governance.

Organisation

The discipline is published as a set of repositories under the Source-Engineering GitHub organisation. One authoritative home per artefact:

Repo	Owns
Source-Engineering/.github	Org profile README
Source-Engineering/project-governance	Change process, ADRs, RFCs, release policy
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-foundations (this repo)	Discipline definition, principles, terminology
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-research	Research agenda, hypotheses, experimental protocols
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-model	Canonical conceptual and data model
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-specifications	Normative technical requirements
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-architecture	Reference architecture, blueprint stack
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-reference-implementation	Working reference code
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-conformance	Conformance test suite
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-tools	Reusable software utilities
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-case-studies	Evaluated demonstrations, case studies
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-practice	Practitioner guidance
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-education	Curriculum and learning resources

Status

This is the foundations slice. The canonical manifesto and the positioning matrix are stable; updates follow the change process in the governance repo. The terminology is a working document and evolves with the discipline.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.