The camayoc / yupana thesis boundary

Implementation status (2026-08-17): ✅ Proposed and written down on both sides. Agreed by: pending keeper sign-off. The mirror of this section is in yupana/docs/design/paper.md §2.1; if the two ever disagree, neither paper should draft until they are reconciled.

Why this exists before either paper drafts

camayoc-105 names the risk precisely: both papers instantiate one principle — a check that cannot fail is not a check, and absence of a finding is not a finding of absence — and if both claim it, reviewers see one idea published twice and both papers weaken.

Retrofitting a boundary after two drafts exist is much harder than agreeing one now, so this is written before drafting rather than after.

The split

The shared principle is cited by both and claimed as a contribution by neither. It is older than either system. What each paper contributes is a layer at which the principle is enforced, and the mechanisms that enforcement required.

Put in one line each:

• camayoc: knowledge must earn its way in, and a verification that cannot fail has not earned anything.
• yupana: a guard that returns nothing must say which kind of nothing.

Each paper cites the other for the layer it does not own.

Two collisions the bead did not anticipate

Reading both plan docs against each other turned up two places where the split above is not self-executing. Both must be settled before drafting.

Collision 1: the installation-time gate proof

yupana/docs/design/paper.md §4 closes with:

the installer proving each refusal gate with deliberately invalid probes that each omit exactly one required property, so the arms discriminate

That is camayoc's mechanism, described in yupana's paper. It lives here: scripts/gate_probe.sh (248 lines) and tests/test_gate_probe.py (302 lines), and establishing that the arms genuinely discriminate is an open camayoc bead (camayoc-104).

Proposed resolution: camayoc owns it, yupana cites it. The reasoning is that the probes prove admission gates — they establish that a refusal shape is enforced rather than merely declared, which is the admission thesis applied to camayoc's own installer. Yupana's use of the same idea is a one-line citation, not a contribution, and the sentence above should become a citation in yupana's draft.

This is a nice piece of self-application and worth a sentence in camayoc's write-up: the paper's own thesis, turned on the paper's own installer. Yupana calls the same discipline non-vacuity; the papers should use one name for it, and since the mechanism sits here, camayoc's term should follow yupana's existing published usage rather than mint a second one.

Collision 2: Empty | Partial | Full coverage reporting

Both systems report coverage as a graded verdict rather than a bare count:

• camayoc: scripts/competency.py returns Empty | Partial | Full for ontology coverage, with a NO COVERAGE outcome.
• yupana: dataset coverage reported as empty | none | partial | full.

Proposed resolution: no exclusivity is needed, because neither paper claims the shape as a contribution. They apply it to different objects — an ontology's reach versus a dataset's population — and each should cite the other as an independent instance. Two systems converging on the same reporting shape from different directions is evidence for the principle, and is worth one sentence in each paper saying so. What must not happen is either paper presenting the shape as novel.

What this costs camayoc, stated plainly

The boundary is not free, and the paper should not pretend otherwise.

Handing the non-answer taxonomy to yupana means camayoc gives up its most immediately legible contribution — ten crisp distinctions, each forced by an incident, is very good paper material. What camayoc keeps is narrower and harder to make vivid: a write-time refusal, a mandatory falsifier, and a corpus.

Two things make that a good trade. First, camayoc's typed non-answers are one instance (NO COVERAGE, on the ontology's own coverage — see implemented-set.md aspect 8), while yupana's are a systematic taxonomy with per-distinction incident provenance. The stronger claim belongs where the stronger evidence is. Second, camayoc's retained territory contains the thing neither other paper can claim: the incident-night corpus, eleven measured instances of unfalsifiable verification on a live crew. Most papers about verification integrity have no field data at all.

Relationship to the third leg

Both papers sit in a three-paper program and should say so identically:

• quipu compiles SARC into the store — submitted to arXiv (no public identifier yet).
• yupana compiles it into the action.
• camayoc governs admission — what may enter at all.

The nearest external anchor for camayoc is SARC-DQ, which quipu's related-work section describes as gating evidence quality; evidence quality is camayoc's territory rather than yupana's, and that is the cleanest one-sentence statement of why the admission leg is a separate paper.