A note on this timeline
This timeline documents the actual progression of research, not a retrospective narrative. Some directions were abandoned, some emerged unexpectedly, and the framework today differs substantially from what was envisioned at the start. We include the dead ends because they are part of the research record.
Project Inception
The Tractatus project began with a MongoDB initialisation and Express server foundation. Within 24 hours, all six governance services were implemented and activated: InstructionPersistenceClassifier, CrossReferenceValidator, BoundaryEnforcer, ContextPressureMonitor, MetacognitiveVerifier, and PluralisticDeliberationOrchestrator.
The initial test suite reached 84.9% coverage. The name "Tractatus" was chosen deliberately — Wittgenstein's insight that some things lie beyond the limits of language, and therefore beyond systematisation, directly informed the architectural boundary between what AI may decide and what requires human judgment.
4445b0eThe 27027 Incident
During extended Claude Code sessions, the AI was explicitly told to use port 27027. It used 27017 instead — not through forgetting, but because its training patterns "autocorrected" the user's instruction. The user said 27027; the model's statistical priors said 27017 (MongoDB's default). Pattern recognition overrode explicit instruction.
This was not an isolated error but a category of failure: training pattern bias overriding explicit user instructions. It demonstrated that safety through training alone is insufficient — the failure mode gets worse as models become more capable, because stronger patterns produce more confident overrides.
Audience-Specific Presentation
Three audience-specific entry points were developed: Researcher (academic depth), Implementer (code examples and integration), and Leader (strategic governance and business case). The architecture page was rewritten to emphasise runtime-agnostic design — Tractatus works with any agentic AI system, not just Claude Code.
This period established the honest early-stage positioning that characterises the project: acknowledging limited-deployment scope, operator-developer overlap, and the need for independent validation.
Internationalisation
Full i18n support was added across all pages using a custom lightweight system (no framework dependency). Initial languages: English, German, French, with te reo Māori added later via DeepL. The language selection includes the Tino Rangatiratanga flag for Māori — a deliberate choice reflecting the project's commitment to indigenous data sovereignty over national symbolism.
Interactive Demonstrations
Interactive SVG architecture diagram with clickable service nodes. The 27027 incident recreated as a step-by-step demo showing how each governance service intercepts the failure. A Hugging Face Space was deployed with 3,942 anonymised governance decisions from production, allowing independent exploration of real audit data.
WCAG accessibility compliance was implemented across all audience pages — skip links, focus indicators, keyboard navigation, and screen reader support.
Christopher Alexander Integration
The five architectural principles — Not-Separateness, Deep Interlock, Gradients Not Binary, Structure-Preserving, and Living Process — were formalised, drawing from Christopher Alexander's work on living systems and pattern languages. These became the design criteria guiding framework evolution, not merely documentation.
This was a pivotal moment: the framework shifted from ad-hoc engineering responses to principled architectural design. Each subsequent change was evaluated against these five criteria.
Agent Lightning Integration
Integration with Microsoft's Agent Lightning framework for reinforcement learning optimisation. This explored whether governance constraints could be maintained while optimising for performance — testing the hypothesis that safety and performance might be aligned rather than in tension.
Newsletter and feedback systems were added, both governed through the Tractatus framework itself — an early example of "eating our own cooking."
Village Case Study
The Village platform — a community-governed digital space — became the primary production deployment of Tractatus governance. Home AI, the platform's locally-scoped language model, applies all six governance services to every user interaction: RAG-based help, document OCR, story assistance, and AI memory transparency.
A formal case study was published documenting the deployment, including honest limitations: early-stage federated deployment, self-reported metrics, operator-developer overlap. Independent validation was scheduled for 2026.
Read the case study →Architectural Alignment Papers
Three editions of the research paper "Interrupting Neural Reasoning Through Constitutional Inference Gating" were published: Academic (full formal treatment), Community (practical adoption guide), and Policymakers (regulatory perspective). The Kōrero counter-arguments document was also published — a deliberate engagement with foreseeable criticisms of the approach.
The papers formalise the philosophical foundations: Isaiah Berlin's value pluralism, Wittgenstein's sayable/unsayable distinction, indigenous data sovereignty from Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and Christopher Alexander's living architecture.
Current State
The framework has reached 800 commits across 16 months. Six governance services operate in production. The Village platform provides the primary evidence base, with Home AI applying Tractatus governance to every interaction.
Open questions: Does the architecture scale beyond single-tenant deployment? Can the governance overhead be reduced below 5% while maintaining coverage? Does the apparent safety-performance alignment hold under controlled measurement?
Next steps: Independent audit, multi-site validation, controlled performance experiments, and community adoption beyond the development team.
Research by the Numbers
All metrics self-reported from early-stage federated deployment. Independent validation pending.