12. Open Questions

(Normative — questions identified as unresolved; SHALL be addressed in future revisions)

12.1 Is Cultivated Intent a distinct fourth intent source, or a matured form of Discovered Intent validated through trust development? If distinct, does Cultivated Intent undergo a formalization lifecycle in which cultivated judgment is externalized, articulated as governance heuristics, and eventually incorporated into Constitutional Intent for subsequent governance interfaces? If so, this lifecycle represents a mechanism by which governance infrastructure improves through operation — and may require separate stewardship mechanisms analogous to how Business Rule management formalizes decision logic that was previously embedded in process or tacit knowledge.

12.2 Does the four-priority ordering (Constitutional > Discovered > Cultivated > Emergent) map to a structural layer ordering? If so, the layer ordering reflects a values hierarchy, not an arbitrary sequence.

12.3 How does intent governance scale across multiple human principals with divergent intent? The single-principal case is operationally validated. The multi-principal case is architecturally specified but not operationally tested.

12.4 What does “genuine endorsement” mean for organizational intent? Whether a team, department, or enterprise can examine and endorse its intent determines how L7 scales from individual to organizational discovery.

12.5 Resolved in v1.1. Bidirectional intent flow requires explicit mechanisms. See Clause 8.11.

12.6 Does “grown, not built” apply to the governance infrastructure itself? If governance structures that work must emerge from operational evidence rather than pre-configuration, the Intent Stack deploys as a framework that discovers its own appropriate configuration.

12.7 How do coordination interfaces handle trust asymmetry? When Peer A trusts Peer B more than B trusts A, the trust calibration mechanism must handle asymmetry within symmetric authority.

12.8 How should the framework handle intent that the principal actively wants to remain implicit? Not everything that can be surfaced should be surfaced.

12.9 How should the knowledge architecture determine tier boundaries? The cost-depth tradeoff is real and bidirectional: defaulting to Tier 3 for every governance question recreates the batch processing bottleneck that Tier 1 was designed to eliminate, while defaulting to Tier 1 alone sacrifices structural insight.