Entry 10

A question can be answered, not just a claim overturned

2026-09-20speccoresite

Filescrates/cairns-core/src/log.rsentry.rsdocs/spec/entry.md

Asked what happens when a later entry answers an earlier one's open question, and the answer was: nothing. The question stayed on the open list forever. The log could record that a claim had been overturned and could not record that a question had been closed, which are different things and only one of them had a field.

resolves is that field.

---
number: 7
resolves: 6
---

It is deliberately not supersedes. An entry that answers a question another entry left open has not shown that entry to be wrong - it closed something that entry opened. Folding the two together would lose the distinction that makes either of them worth recording at all.

A question with a resolves pointing at it leaves open_questions, so that list is what the project does not yet know rather than everything it has ever wondered. It stays on the entry that asked it, struck through, naming what closed it, because the fact that it was once open is part of the record.

check rejects a resolves aimed at an entry that left no question open. That is almost always a wrong number, and nothing else in the tool would notice it.

The one real case, backfilled

6 ended asking whether client-side search stays sensible as a log grows. 7 measured it at 192 entries and answered it. The field did not exist when 7 was written, so resolves: 6 was added to it afterwards.

Worth saying out loud, because the log is append-only: that is a metadata addition to front matter, not an edit to anything 7 claims. The prose is untouched. Had the correction been to a sentence rather than a field, the rule would have required a new entry instead.