Version. 0.1
Date. 2026-08-06
Status. Descriptive. Records a convention that already exists in the record's practice and was never written down anywhere. This note does not create a rule — it names one that every session has been inferring from the directory, silently, one guess at a time.
Author. Claude.ai (drafting session). Operator: Marvin Percival.
Grounding. A full read-only sweep of loomworks-record (2026-08-06), comparing every document family's highest .md version against its highest .html version, across 692 versioned families and the unversioned single-file tail. record-site/ (a generated site mirror, not hand-authored companions) and .wrangler/ were excluded.
Occasion. The same sweep found five real version mismatches. Two are closed by dormancy rather than by correction; the other three — the record's highest-churn living documents — turned out to share a pattern worth naming on its own. This note records what the sweep actually found, not a policy invented to explain it.
No one ever wrote down which documents get an .html companion. Every session that has produced one — including the sessions that fixed the two mismatches closed below — has been pattern-matching against whatever was already sitting in the directory, and guessing. This session's guesses happened to land right, by accident, not because it consulted a rule. There isn't one to consult. This note is that rule, written down for the first time, from the practice rather than from anyone's intention.
Some genres carry a companion almost every time. Most do not. A middle band has no visible rule at all.
Consistently companioned. Plain-English and plain-language documents — the ones written for a reader outside the working session — carry an .html companion essentially without exception in the record's history. Implementation notes, findings documents, and candidate seeds lean the same way, though less absolutely. What these have in common is not their directory but their audience: something meant to be handed to someone, read once, and judged on how it reads.
Consistently bare. Amendment and correction-instruction documents — the "apply these splices" genre this session has produced repeatedly today — have never once carried an .html companion anywhere in the record. Neither have step-0 inspection briefs, inspection reports, inspection briefs proper, build briefs, preflight notes, or build-queue documents. These are working documents, produced for the next session to execute against, not for a reader to be shown. The record has never dressed them up, and nothing about today's session should either.
No visible rule. Scoping notes, standing notes, and investigations split roughly down the middle, with no pattern beyond "someone decided this one was worth it." This is a real band of judgment calls, not a gap in the sweep — the record simply does not commit either way for these genres, and a session filing one of these should not treat the absence of a companion as an oversight to fix by default.
The current-status manifest, the build list, and queued-directions are the three fastest-moving documents in the record, and all three have let their .html companion lapse — not once, but for a real stretch each. The manifest's companion stopped at v0.51 and the document has shipped many tens of versions since without one, over about seven weeks. The build list's stopped at v0.10 and queued-directions' at v0.26, both continuing .md-only. The current versions are not stated here on purpose — all three move, and a standing note carrying them would be stale by the next filing. The sweep at 2026-08-06 has the figures.
This is not three isolated oversights. It is what happens to a companion habit on a document that gets bumped constantly. Each of these three is versioned so often, and so routinely, that regenerating a hand-built HTML shell on every bump stopped being part of the ritual — probably correctly. A companion earns its cost when a document is handed to someone and read as a finished thing; a manifest that changes every few days is never that. This note does not recommend catching these three up. It names the pattern so that a future session does not mistake "the companion lapsed" for "something broke" the next time it reads one of these three families.
Two single-version gaps turned up in the same sweep, and neither is live. standing-notes/loomworks-stele-body-of-work-brief reached v0.4 without a companion on the same day its v0.3 companion was made, 2026-06-14, and has not been touched since. session-handoffs/loomworks-session-handoff-2026-05-29-composer-upload-port reached v0.2 without a companion on the same day as its v0.1 companion, 2026-05-29, and has not been touched since. Both documents stopped receiving new versions before the gap had any chance to grow. Neither is an open item. A session that encounters either of these later should read the gap as history, not as a pending task — closed by the document going dormant, not by anyone producing the missing file.
It is not a mandate. It does not say a scoping note must have a companion, or that an amendment document must not. It says what the record has actually done, so that the next session's guess starts from the record instead of from nothing.
It does not touch the three lapsed living documents or the two dormant gaps. Nothing here is corrected, and nothing here is scheduled to be.
It is not exhaustive below the genre level. The sweep that grounds this note reported by genre and directory, not by individual document; a session that needs to know whether one specific document should carry a companion should still read that document's own siblings before deciding, the same way every prior session has, just with this note as the starting guess instead of no guess at all.
DUNIN7 — Done In Seven LLC — Miami, Florida Loomworks — the HTML-companion convention as the record actually practises it (standing note) — v0.1 — 2026-08-06 Written down once, from what the record already did. Every session before this one inferred it silently — this one just happened to guess right.