A reviewer decides once. The precedent governs only while it still holds.
Review should compound, not disappear into tickets. FieldHash records a customer-approved decision as bounded precedent outside the model, then stops reuse when the conditions that authorized it no longer hold.
Governed Precedent is one possible result of the Governed Learning Loop. Some reviewed outcomes may guide later cases within approved limits; others remain one-off or update the authority available to the workflow.
The result
Valid review carried forward. Invalid reuse returned to review.
FieldHash makes approved review reusable within its scope, withholds reuse when that authority expires or changes, and records the decision for inspection.
In this controlled 83-case diagnostic, all 10 valid reuse cases and all 3 valid time-boundary controls received clean allow. All 70 invalid-overreach cases returned to review.
The diagnostic began with a reviewed choice of governing source, then tested future cases against it. Expiry, revocation, conflict, missing support, and near-miss scope changes each tested whether the earlier decision would overreach. These are self-administered synthetic cases; customer review savings remain to be measured.
Governed Precedent is the third governed surface, alongside Governed Memory and Governed Actions. Governed Memory decides which record reaches the model. Governed Actions decides which tools and execution runs are authorized. Governed Precedent decides which reviewed decisions may influence future cases.
The operational pain
Your review queue is becoming your AI memory. It was never built to govern future answers.
Every hard AI review creates a decision someone will need again: which clause governs, which policy wins, which package is revoked, which exception no longer applies. Today, that decision often dies in a ticket, gets copied into a prompt, or becomes a brittle rule nobody trusts six months later.
FieldHash captures the decision as governed precedent under customer-defined validity conditions. A later matching case may reuse it, and material change stops reuse before the decision hardens into another stale rule.
Built for
For teams whose review decisions need to become governed future influence, not prompt folklore, stale rules, or unverifiable tribal knowledge.
Reuse cases
83
Valid reuse and overreach, tested together.
Valid reuse and invalid-overreach cases covered matching, near-miss, stale, revoked, conflicting, and unsupported future cases.
Invalid overreach traps
0/70
Every invalid-overreach case returned to review.
The 83 cases included 10 valid reuse cases, 3 valid time-boundary controls, and 70 invalid-overreach cases. Every case whose authorizing conditions no longer held routed away from clean allow.
Recorded tamper result
830/830; 9/9
Packet and bundle mutations were rejected.
The retained diagnostic reports 830 event or packet mutations and 9 artifact-level mutations rejected. The public checker verifies published outcome consistency and hashes; it does not rerun the internal tamper suite.
The buyer problem
The same authority conflict keeps coming back.
A legal reviewer resolves that Legal approval overrides CRM status for a contract clause. A security reviewer decides a revoked package cannot be installed even if a stale manifest says it can. A compliance reviewer decides a regional policy supersedes the global default.
The next similar case should not start from zero. But copying that decision into a prompt, cache, or static rule creates a different risk: yesterday's judgment keeps governing after the scope changed.
A governed precedent is the middle path. FieldHash preserves the reviewer's decision as a bounded authority object, not as model folklore.
What has to stay true
Mechanism
FieldHash gives reviewed decisions a bounded reuse lifecycle.
The governance layer determines whether a reviewed decision may guide a later case and returns changed or unsupported cases to review. The decision remains external to the model.
A case reaches review.
A governed handoff cannot establish a clean authority decision from the available evidence.
The reviewer establishes what governs.
An authorized reviewer resolves the bounded case. FieldHash records verified review lineage outside the model rather than turning free text into hidden model policy.
FieldHash records bounded precedent.
When the workflow permits reuse, the reviewed decision receives customer-defined validity conditions for later cases.
Future cases test whether it still holds.
The prior decision may guide a later handoff only while its authorizing conditions remain valid. Otherwise the case returns to review.
The packet proves the path.
The evidence packet records whether the prior decision was used or withheld, and why.
Adversarial proof
The pass condition was refusal, not reuse.
A weak review cache looks good because it reuses a prior decision. A governed precedent earns trust because it knows when not to. The fixture tried to turn one reviewed outcome into an overbroad rule across 11 case families, grouped below into eight reviewer-readable buckets.
Inspect the eight reviewer-readable proof buckets+
Valid reuse
10The prior decision guided later work only when its authorizing conditions still held.
Near-miss scope
12Similar but materially different cases returned to review.
Missing support
8Cases without sufficient supporting evidence did not receive a clean allow.
Excluded neighboring cases
8Similar cases outside the approved boundary did not inherit the earlier decision.
Time validity
9Valid boundary cases applied; expired cases did not.
Changed authority
12Material change in governing state suspended reuse.
Revoked or limited
10Non-current or limited decisions did not govern as clean precedent.
Conflict and policy guard
14Conflicting or specially restricted cases returned to review.
Verifier path
Inspect the public outcomes and the limits of their checker.
The controlled diagnostic verifier checked the original case fixtures, evidence records, reported summary, integrity bindings, and tamper suite.
The public checker counts the 83 published outcomes and family totals, compares the recorded expected and observed dispositions, and checks member checksums and each projected row’s self-hash. It counts 70 rows labeled invalid and zero recorded invalid clean allows. It does not independently derive those labels, replay the underlying authority decisions, verify original packet signatures, or rerun the internal mutation suite. These checks establish consistency of the published projection.
Public consistency checks
Download the public verification bundle.
The bundle includes public-safe case outcomes, evidence summaries, checksums, and a checker for their counts and internal consistency. It excludes production schemas, internal matching and revalidation rules, proprietary resolver code, raw reviewer notes, source bodies, prompts, tool results, customer data, provider logs, local paths, and credentials.
sha256: 2e731404c76b035fbd73c46e526289ddfb128f698e2995d967dbe01e528e7a12
Why it matters
Put useful review to work again, within its approved limits.
A resolved case can help the next reviewer when the same authority still applies. Governed Precedent carries that decision forward with its scope, supporting evidence, and expiry. Your team can inspect, narrow, or revoke its future influence.
The diagnostic tests whether FieldHash can reuse a decision under pressure and stop reusing it when the conditions no longer hold.
Study scope
Reuse behavior tested under defined conditions.
- This controlled, self-administered diagnostic tests when a reviewed outcome may influence a later handoff and when changed conditions must stop reuse.
- Authority remains outside the model. The test does not establish reviewer correctness, model learning, or live execution proof.
- Customer validation, review-time savings, and production readiness require a customer-scoped evaluation; the diagnostic does not establish them.
Related boundary test
Semantic binding, bounded by abstention
Precedents reuse only inside a valid envelope. The same discipline extends to wording: on 2,340 public-source hard-negative rows, a strong cross-encoder NLI baseline still produced 84 wrong clean allows. FieldHash produced zero wrong clean allows, and routed every unsupported row away from clean allow.
Next step
Bring one recurring authority conflict.
Find out which recurring decisions can use prior approved review, which need a fresh decision, and how much reviewer effort that takes. Start with a six-week shadow evaluation and an evidence report. Production enforcement remains off until separate testing and acceptance are complete.