Knowledge
Nothing is forgotten, and rulings are retrievable. A team that can't find its own decisions re-argues them forever — so the Banister makes its decisions queryable.
Decisions you can look up — so you don't re-argue them
Ask "what did we decide about X?" and get the ruling back with its source. That closes the gap where a decision was made, written down, and then lost — so the team never quietly re-solves a settled question from memory.
This isn't hypothetical: the exact "ratified-but-not-retrievable" failure was caught live during this platform's own build, which is why this layer earns its place.
The language is built so it can't oversell: "live" always means observed to be operating, never a hopeful field in a file. And nothing is treated as known without a source — every answer can point at where it came from. When your documentation is brought in, the Banister reasons from your grounded knowledge, not guesses.
A decision index you can ask
Ratified rulings live in a version-controlled authority layer, with a vector search behind it for anything not yet indexed. A query hits the authority index first; on a miss it falls to semantic search before returning a ruling back with its source.
Four independent axes of status
Knowledge is graded on four independent axes — document state, decision state, build state, and team state — so "live" always means observed to be operating, never a hopeful field in a file. The language itself can't be used to oversell.
Provenance on everything
Nothing is treated as known without a cited source; every answer the Banister gives can point at where it came from. When your documentation is ingested (see Delivery Factory), it enters this same governed, provenance-tracked base — so the Banister reasons from your grounded knowledge, not guesses.
