Concepts

The Concepts chapters explain the model behind idiolect. They begin with a concrete coordination failure, introduce the records that make translation knowledge public, and then develop the formal and governance consequences. Procedures stay in the Guides; field-level contracts stay in Reference.

A first pass

Read these chapters in order if the project is new to you:

1. Why idiolect exists names the private-converter problem and follows one translation through the record family.
2. What you need first supplies the small amount of ATProto and panproto background used elsewhere.
3. Idiolect, dialect, language separates the linguistic analogy from the concrete runtime artifacts.
4. The dev.idiolect.* lexicon family maps those artifacts onto the sixteen record kinds shipped by the repository.

Runtime model

The next four chapters explain how the runtime interprets those records:

• Records in signed, content-addressed repositories distinguishes record identity, record content, and repository proof.
• Open enums and vocabularies explains how unfamiliar slugs survive decoding and acquire community-specific meanings.
• The vocabulary knowledge graph develops the graph queries behind that interpretation.
• Observer protocol explains how event folds become independently published observation records.

Formal and governance paths

Lens semantics and laws is the formal center of the book. It introduces complements, round-trip laws, optic classification, and symmetric span construction against panproto 0.71.0. Deliberation then separates a community's decision process from its settled beliefs and recommendations. Lexicon evolution policy closes the section by comparing the intended migration gate with the enforcement that the current checkout actually provides.