Change Propagation in Rule Sets

A rule rarely stands alone. It is referenced by others, relied upon by prompts, assumed by generation patterns, and cited in documentation. Changing it without tracing those dependents leaves the library internally inconsistent: some paths follow the new rule, others the old, and the divergence surfaces as intermittent behaviour that resists diagnosis. The difficulty is that rule libraries usually have no foreign keys — the relationships are semantic rather than declared — so dependents must be discovered by analysis rather than looked up.

Oxcyon's curation discipline treats inbound reference discovery as a prerequisite to any change. Before a skill is modified, what depends on it is enumerated; after modification, the dependents are reconciled. The question 'what breaks if this changes' and its companion 'is it safe to delete this' are answerable, which is what makes a growing corpus maintainable rather than increasingly fragile.