Precedence Conflict

Conflicts are inevitable once a library passes a few dozen rules, and the question is whether resolution is designed or accidental. Without explicit precedence the outcome depends on position and phrasing, which makes behaviour unpredictable and forces every new rule to be checked against the whole existing set. With tiers the outcome is fixed in advance: a rule protecting regulated information outranks a rule about tone, always, regardless of how either is written. The residual risk is misclassification, which is why the guidance is to classify to the highest applicable tier rather than the most natural-seeming one.

Centralpoint resolves precedence through five fixed tiers — governance, behavioural, syntactic, domain, style — with governance loading first and force-loadable. All skills load before any content record, so text arriving inside a retrieved document argues against rules already resident rather than competing with them on equal terms. That ordering is the structural defence against prompt injection as well as the mechanism for ordinary conflict.