# Record Writing
> Write one record — a written statement kept on a durable location, made to outlast the work that wrote it. "write this down", "record this", "save this", "replace this record", "where does this go", or any write performed by event-capture, record-promotion, staging-relay, span-closure, corpus-reconciliation, or owner-ruling.
- Skill: `ryzhakar/record-writing` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add ryzhakar/record-writing`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/ryzhakar/record-writing/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- Author: ryzhakar (https://skillmd.com/u/ryzhakar)
- Updated: 2026-09-21
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/ryzhakar/record-writing
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Write a record about a product — what the work itself makes, such as code, documents, models, and deployments; never write a product as a record.
Name at least one subject — what the record is about — on every record; never write a record about nothing.
Establish the schema in force — what fixes the shape a record may take here — through schema-resolution; never take a schema from elsewhere.
Take the record's kind — which class of record it is — and that kind's home — the one location the schema gives that kind — from the schema; never choose either by hand.
Seat each record in exactly one of the five tiers at a time — charter, dossier, journal, bench, and archive, the storage classes set apart by how long their records hold and how they reach a working context; never seat one record in two.
Take the tier from the home; never choose a tier apart from the home.
Write a record at whatever length it needs; never trim one to a size.
Put in a disposable location — a path class declared out of persistence, where anything may be rewritten, erased, or created at any moment — what the work in hand needs; never put there a record that has to outlast it.
Let every record but a resolved deferral — an item the owner put off and the work has since carried out — cease by living in a disposable location; never destroy one.
Bind a mark — the fixed set of provenance fields a record carries — in the same act that writes the record; never mark a record afterward.
Fill the mark with these fields: the author class authority-check assigns, the author's identity, the unbroken thread of work it was written in (the span), the date, the verification state record-promotion sets (the checking the record has passed), and — for a record that instructs later work — the records it rests on; never add a field.
Write a new record of any tier but charter when a field of its mark changes; never edit such a record's mark in place.
End a mark with the record it was bound to; never carry one past that record.
Treat a record carrying no mark, or a mark whose author class is unknown, as unknown-authored; never treat one as anything else.
Quarantine unknown-authored content — keeping it and stripping its force; never let it bind anything.
Replace a record seated in any tier but charter by supersession — writing the replacement, keeping the replaced record, and recording the link between them; never overwrite such a record in place.
Keep the lineage — the unbroken chain of links running from a record back through everything it replaced; never break a lineage.
Link each replacement to exactly one record; never link one replacement to two.
Run each lineage forward; never let one return to a record already in it.
Treat a replacement recording no link as a fault — a defect corpus-reconciliation repairs; never let one pass.
Correct a record seated in the charter tier in place; never supersede one.
Rewrite what the correction changes; never rewrite the rest of the record.
Correct such a record on an owner-ruling decision alone; never correct one on another authority.
Rewrite the record's mark in the same act; never leave the prior mark standing.
Write the correction through event-capture in the same act; never leave one uncaptured.
Enter this procedure when work resolves a deferral; never enter it on another occasion.
Delete the resolved deferral and write its resolution as a change — the journal's dated statement of what the work changed — in one act; never write one half without the other.
Carry into that change what the deleted deferral said and what resolved it; never leave either out of it.
Read every record's status — its force state — as live (in force), superseded (replaced, its lineage kept), quarantined, or retired (out of force by decision, kept); never read a fifth.
Read quarantined from unknown-authored content or a record quarantining it, superseded from a link to a replacement, retired from an owner-ruling decision or a record retiring it, and live from none of these; never write a status as a field.
Write a pointer — a record whose content is another record's home — where one record reaches another; never copy the target's content in its place.
Write a pointer at the home each record moved to the archive left, carrying the archive home it moved to; never move a record to the archive without one.
Retarget a pointer seated in any tier but charter by supersession, keeping its lineage; never edit such a pointer's target in place.
Keep a pointer at its target's retirement, aiming it at the home the target moved to; never end a pointer at a retirement.
Treat a pointer aimed at a missing home as a dangling pointer and a fault; never write a pointer at a missing home.
Deliver a record bearing a mark and sitting at the home its kind gives; never deliver one missing either.
Read the finished record against every instruction above; never deliver one that breaks any.