THE OPERATING APPROACH
Meta Guide connects source history, competing explanations, governed experiments and verified consequences without collapsing uncertainty into an unsupported answer.
HOW META GUIDE WORKS
Meta Guide is a composition of reusable investigation and governance mechanisms. Each has a distinct job—and a different evidentiary standard.
Connect observable failures to source Components, their Configurations, dependencies, historical revisions and Topologies. Separate direct observations, dependency adjacency and unverified explanations.
Practical output: a traceable map of where to investigate and which relationships still need proof.
Develop competing explanations; ask what each predicts; refine the questions using observed evidence and propose discriminating tests. Track whether the available information is sufficient to reason or act.
Practical output: explicit hypotheses, falsifiers, expected outcomes and next experiments—not an unexplained confidence score.
Define authorized scope and protected behavior, require independent evidence before an operation, keep source and decision Provenance, and preserve recovery options. Deny action when the needed authority or evidence is missing.
Practical output: bounded, reviewable evidence and explicit acceptance or refusal—not permission inferred from a passing test.
These mechanisms have working implementations and bounded demonstrations. Their presence does not certify that every proposed causal explanation is correct or that arbitrary defects can be repaired.
HOW AN INVESTIGATION PROCEEDS
These mechanisms are designed to be reusable across problems while preserving distinctions between observation, inference and authorization.
Identify what the system must achieve, what must remain unchanged and which decisions are in scope.
Gather actual source, test and environmental evidence; generate rival hypotheses and record how they differ.
Prefer experiments whose outcomes could change the diagnosis; do not equate mere adjacency with causation.
Run authorized checks independently where possible, refuse unsupported actions and preserve an auditable recovery path.
SCOPED INVESTIGATION
Start by defining the evidence your team already has and the consequence you need to avoid.