A property system for tacit skill.
Tacit means the part you cannot write down. Not the procedure, which is in the manual, but the feel — where you slow, how you load it, what you do when the job is not what the drawing said it would be.
Everything else is machinery around these.
| The object | What it is | Whose it is |
|---|---|---|
| The session | The raw record of a person working — what their hands did, what the machine did back, and what they were looking at when they acted | Theirs. Information about an identifiable person, held under licence, withdrawn at will |
| The built thing | What a machine or a model actually runs, made away from the machine, from sessions that were admitted | Ours. Our instrument, our work, our checking |
| The consent | Which agreements are live, for this session, right now — checked at the moment of recording, not assumed from a file | Separable. Given one at a time and withdrawn one at a time |
| The count | Hours in use, written at the moment a person chooses whose way of working is running | The basis of payment, and a right to an accounting |
Tables scroll sideways on a narrow screen.
One act does two jobs, and neither was designed around the other.
Before anything runs, somebody chooses whose way of working is in it: the basics it came with, the way an owner's own operator taught it, or a specialist hired by name. A person picks, and the choice is written down with their name on it.
That single act is the human authorization the machine may not move without, and it is the start of the count that pays the person whose way of working was chosen. The clearance and the invoice come from the same record, which means neither can be quietly adjusted without the other.
No default and no last-used. A machine that picks up yesterday's choice on its own has moved on nobody's authority. Choosing is an act, not a setting.
Four things people reasonably assume, and none of them are true.
It is not a robot
Even Steven makes nothing that moves. It is the agreement, the register and the count that sit underneath somebody else's machine.
It is not a staffing agency
You are not hiring a person for the day and nobody is sent to your site. What is licensed is a way of working, and a person on your own crew still says go.
It is not a scoreboard
Nothing here grades how somebody works. The checks are about equipment and paperwork. Whether a recording is good enough to learn from is a bar somebody has to set, and until it is set we measure and decline to judge.
It is not a sale
We never acquire a person's technique. It stays in their hands and their career whatever any paper says, and an instrument that took it outright would destroy the reason to keep paying them.
A way of working proposes. It never authorizes.
A technique that has been loaded has no authority of its own. Nothing moves because a way of working was loaded.
It sits at the bottom
Hard safety limits outrank every person, and every person outranks the software. A way of working is software.
Loaded is not cleared
Fitted and ready are states a machine can reach on its own. Cleared to work is a person's word, given on the day.
Nothing is learned on the machine
The learning happens away from it. Nothing crosses but a release with a named person's signature on it.