Artifacts

Definition

The fourth layer of the PAAA governance model (ADR-0143): everything a repository has produced and kept — the software itself, plus ADRs, tests, evidence, manifests, ledgers, and recorded decisions. It answers "what evidence and memory already exist?". This is by a wide margin the richest layer in HydraFlow: docs/arch/generated/ is regenerated every pull request, docs/wiki/ (including these term files) carries the repo wiki, .hydraflow/metrics/ carries the measurement streams, the append-only ledgers carry decisions and escapes, and a stamped repository carries a kernel lock. Artifacts are what the evidence collectors read to produce the normalized facts a decision layer classifies; read as input they are evidence, but evidence is not a fifth PAAA layer.

Invariants

• Evidence is Artifacts read as input, never a fifth layer — the four layers stay four.
• Ledger records are append-only: an artifact is added or superseded, never silently rewritten.
• A conformance claim over Artifacts must be reproducible offline from a clean checkout — no claim may depend on an external service being up.