Purpose-specific standing, provenance, versions, contradictions, and unresolved gaps.
Settlement
Completion must be observed—not assumed.
A cognitive act is not complete because a model answered or an API returned success. The organisation needs to know what changed, under whose authority, on what evidence, and whether the obligation actually settled.
Completion
A tool call is not a business result.
An agent can call an API and receive 200 OK while the organisational obligation remains unresolved. A message can be sent to the wrong audience. A record can fail downstream. A mitigation can be promised but never observed.
Settlement asks what institutional state is now true—and what proves it. It closes the gap between execution telemetry and accountable completion.
Read the Complete Cognitive Act Benchmark →Durable proof
Keep the basis, the authority, the effect, and the result.
The approving office, delegated capability, constraints, and any exception authority.
Requested action, execution disposition, resulting state, and any compensation or rollback.
A receipt is not a transcript. It is the durable account of why the act had standing.
Correction and history
Truth can change without erasing what happened.
Evidence can be superseded. Decisions can be corrected. Effects can be compensated. Policies can change. A governed system must preserve both current truth and the historical fact of how an earlier state was reached.
Indwel separates current Settlement from durable Chronicle so correction does not require pretending the prior cognitive act never occurred.
Approval stood on version 3.
The receipt preserves the admitted evidence and authority actually used.
Version 4 supersedes it.
The current state changes while the prior decision remains reconstructable.
Application forms
The same proof burden appears in very different work.
Evidence standing and answer authority matter more than eloquence.
Evidence, decision rights, conditions, and future obligations must survive the review.
Tests, approvals, risks, deployment effects, and observed post-release state form one act.
Apply it
Ask what would count as proof in your process.
The reference simulation can walk through evidence, authority, execution, and completion. The implementation conversation then binds those obligations to your real systems and operating model.