Understand ENTITY, BTDU, ADAM and NIKI as separate responsibilities
The system becomes much clearer when you do not call all four layers “AI” or “storage.” They solve different problems and deliberately do not inherit each other's authority.
| Layer | Primary responsibility | Must not silently do |
|---|---|---|
| ENTITY | Identity, authority, rights, evidence, provenance, economic state and recovery relationships. | Delegate its authority to storage, inference or topology merely because those systems participate. |
| BTDU | Governed information topology: exact objects, atoms, bonds, compounds, indexes, manifests and lineage/economic relationships. | Create ownership or economic entitlement merely because information is ingested/bonded. |
| ADAM | Deterministic state transformation, event/state execution and replay. | Invent authority, rights or semantic truth. |
| NIKI | Bounded causal intelligence/reasoning over governed projections. | Mint authority, rights, ownership or economic consequence because an inference was generated. |
1. Start with governed information
Use the BTDU CLI or APIs to ingest a pinned object/repository under an ENTITY authorization receipt. The BTDU result binds exact content commitments and governed topology.
python tools/entity_btdu_cli.py \ --entity-state STATE \ --btdu-state BTDU \ --adam-root ADAM \ --git-bin git \ ingest-repo PATH --provenance git://owner/repo@COMMIT
2. Reconstruct exact bytes
python tools/entity_btdu_cli.py \ --entity-state STATE \ --btdu-state BTDU \ --adam-root ADAM \ reconstruct OBJECT_REF OUTPUT
Verify the resulting SHA-256. The important property is that the governed information object can be reconstructed exactly from the state that claims to preserve it.
3. Treat ADAM as execution/replay, not authority
ADAM is pinned into ENTITY as a deterministic runtime. When ADAM applies state transitions or replays logged state, the source of authority still comes from ENTITY records/signatures. A successful deterministic transition does not answer “who was allowed to request this?” by itself.
4. Give NIKI bounded context, not sovereign control
NIKI's causal-intelligence and cognition-router layers can operate on governed projections. The correct integration pattern is:
If an AI recommendation implies an action such as ACCESS_DATA, LICENSE, PURCHASE, EXECUTE or SETTLE, that action must still be authorized by ENTITY.
5. Test a forbidden shortcut
A useful negative test is to intentionally create a recommendation or retrieved object for which the actor lacks the required authority/right. The operation must fail even though BTDU can locate the information and NIKI can reason about it.