DC-3 Dual-Pointer
Also known as: DC-3, dual-pointer, dual-pointer discipline
A discipline for recording two distinct commit pointers on every verified-content surface: one to the substrate the claim was made against, and one to the verdict-of-record that attests the claim. Both pointers travel with the content at rendering grain.
When a verification page or methodology footer renders a claim, two questions can be asked independently. First: which version of the substrate (the producer-side claims.yaml, the canonical-numbers pin, the SUBSTRATE.md) was this claim authored against? Second: which verdict from the Veritas pipeline is being relied on to attest that claim? Without both pointers, drift can hide.
The DC-3 dual-pointer discipline pins both. Every verified surface carries two short commit identifiers in its footer: the substrate-pin (e.g., axon_neuroautomata 9304dd1) and the verdict-pin (e.g., axon_veritas 5901575). Either can advance without the other, and the reader can see which.
The discipline came out of an architectural problem: the verdict-of-record register lives in Mattermost (per H-1 handle discipline), and the machine-readable cache of the register lives in axon_veritas/verdicts/. When a substrate-pin advances — say, a new cohort entry lands in the canonical-numbers pin — the verdict for the prior pin does not automatically update. The consumer-render surface needs to know which substrate the verdict was issued against, and that requires both pointers to travel together.
DC-3 dual-pointer is read by the consumer-render overlay at build time. The Astro build picks up the most-recent source_commit for both repos and renders them as a page-body provenance note. If the pointers fall out of sync (e.g., substrate advances but verdict is stale), the inconsistency is visible to the reader rather than papered over.