# PFES Engineering Laws

These laws are consolidated into one navigable document because they are short, closely related, and commonly reviewed together.

## PFES-LAW-001 Evidence Precedes Interpretation

## Statement

Evidence shall remain independently preservable from interpretation.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-002 Preserve Before Simplifying

## Statement

Preserve original engineering information before reduction, transformation, or summarization.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-003 Topology Before Detail

## Statement

Discover structure before committing expensive effort to detailed representation.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-004 Behavior Before Implementation

## Statement

Prioritize validated behavior over implementation-specific assumptions.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-005 Hardware Defines Reality

## Statement

Physical hardware is authoritative when models disagree.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-006 Knowledge Is The Primary Product

## Statement

Tools, artifacts, and applications exist to produce, preserve, validate, or apply knowledge.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-007 Provenance Is Engineering Data

## Statement

Provenance is part of the artifact, not optional metadata.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-008 Validation Determines Confidence

## Statement

Confidence shall not exceed supporting validation.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-009 Engineering Must Be Reproducible

## Statement

Another engineer should be able to reconstruct conclusions from preserved artifacts and method.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-010 Engineering Never Ends With Understanding

## Statement

Understanding should enable new capability, which creates new evidence.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-011 Methodology Outlives Domain Knowledge

## Statement

The project does not require prior expertise in every controller, protocol, or medium.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-012 Tools Serve Engineering

## Statement

Tools are instruments, not ends in themselves.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-013 Capability Enables Discovery

## Statement

New capability should unlock observations that were previously impractical.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-014 Knowledge Is Consolidated Not Duplicated

## Statement

Validated understanding belongs in one canonical PFES location whenever practical.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-015 Validate Constraints Before Accepting Them

## Statement

Distinguish fundamental constraints from missing tooling, automation, evidence, or investment.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-016 Engineering Stewardship

## Statement

Every engineering activity should leave the ecosystem healthier than it was found.

## Status

Adopted during PFES architectural extraction; subject to later engineering review.

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## PFES-LAW-017 Absence of a Surface Is Not Absence of Behavior

## Statement

A missing literal, direct compare, symbol, or scanner hit must not be promoted
as absence of the underlying behavior when indirect representations are plausible.

## Status

Adopted during PFES-MIG-002 analyzer migration.

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## PFES-LAW-018 Expensive Evidence Is a Preserved Asset

## Statement

Long-running analyzer outputs shall be reused, indexed, and locally validated
before a full recomputation is requested.

## Status

Adopted during PFES-MIG-002 analyzer migration.

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## PFES-LAW-019 Seeded State Is Not Natural State

A direct-entry or seeded SRAM probe proves only the block and prerequisites it
actually executes. It must not be described as natural parser-to-consumer
execution without a state-handoff or uninterrupted-execution proof.

## PFES-LAW-020 Bridge Correctness Is Not Firmware Derivation

A bridge or media model may produce correct observable behavior while the
firmware path remains unknown. Operational correctness and firmware derivation
shall be recorded separately.

## PFES-LAW-021 Hardware Stalls Can Be Positive Evidence

Reaching a known hardware-dependent loop after passing a discriminator may prove
parser progress while exposing an MMIO/timer gap. Such a stall must not be
classified as parser failure without contrary evidence.

## PFES-LAW-022 Cross-Reference Without Historical Erasure

A current result may corroborate, reject, constrain, or supersede an interpretation of a historical claim. It shall not delete, silently rewrite, or silently reclassify the historical source record.

## PFES-LAW-023 Graph Density Is Not Evidence Quality

Do not force relationships between unrelated claims or findings merely to eliminate unlinked nodes. Historical-only and current-only records are valid when their source, status, evidence, retention, and destination remain explicit.
