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RFC-0006: Inheritance
Status: Proposed Phase: The Bedrock Phase
Abstract
This RFC formalizes inheritance — the act of receiving and engaging with engineering knowledge from prior work — and distinguishes it from stewardship and from the thread.
Motivation
Engineering knowledge is not created anew each generation. Without a formal concept of inheritance, the standard lacks a mechanism for describing how knowledge flows through time.
Observation
The most enduring engineering traditions explicitly value knowledge transmission. When that transmission breaks down, knowledge is lost and must be re-derived at great cost.
Engineering Principle
Inheritance is the receive discipline: the responsibility to actively understand what has been passed down, not merely to possess it. It is distinguished from stewardship (the transmit discipline) and from the thread (the channel model itself).
Reasoning
Inheritance is the temporal dimension of engineering context. Context preservation (RFC-0003) is meaningless without a mechanism for passing preserved context forward. The distinction between stewardship (transmit) and inheritance (receive) is necessary because they face different failure modes: stewardship fails through neglect; inheritance fails through passivity.
Relationship to Existing Concepts
Inheritance is defined in OE-0010. It depends on stewardship (OE-0009). It is measured by thread integrity (OE-0001).