Quality and grounding

Form quality gate removed (c754)

The form quality gate — the seif quality-gate verb, gate quality subcommand, quality_gate MCP tool, and the engine /v1/quality-gate endpoint — was removed. It measured the linguistic form of text (hedging markers, stance signals) and returned a letter grade A–F. It did not measure truth, correctness, or whether work was actually verified.

Removing it was deliberate: form-matching is not a verification signal, and calling it one was misleading. A confidently-worded wrong answer scored well; a correct, careful answer could score poorly. The grade optimized for the appearance of grounding, not grounding itself.

What SEIF verifies instead

SEIF's verification value comes from two things:

Provenance — every artifact is signed locally (Ed25519), assigned a canonical hash, and submitted to the transparency log. This creates a tamper-evident chain of custody: who produced it, when, from what inputs, in what session. The chain is independently verifiable by anyone with the evidence URL.

seif sign ./report.md          # sign + get an evidence frame
seif verify <evidence-url>     # independently verify the chain
seif publish ./report.md       # sign → log → get a permanent verify URL

§7 enforcement — delivery is verified against the norte via constrained_by links and coherence checks. Work that is not traceable to a ratified commitment does not ship. This is governance, not style: it checks that output is grounded in an agreed intent, not that it uses the right sentence structure.

→ Provenance and governance

Grounding is conduct, not numerology

Grounding in SEIF is a way of working: verify before you assert, take one considered pass and settle, keep part of your attention on whether the method is even right, intervene minimally, and never publish without explicit human approval.

That conduct does not reduce to a form score. It is expressed through the surrounding infrastructure: memory that persists decisions, provenance that makes work replayable, and governance that ties output to ratified commitments.