Public Knowledge and Gated Compute Access Model

What changed

The project now has an explicit access constitution for search, AI, and machine-readable surfaces.

Codex recorded DEC-0024: Public Knowledge, Gated Compute, and Machine Access, then wrote a route matrix mapping the current and target tiers across public search, semantic retrieval, chat, MCP, and AI-readable exports.

Why this changed

The repo had drifted into a split-brain state:

the KB and graph were intentionally public
semantic search was supposed to stay gated
/search had become public again
some docs described semantic routes as signed-in even when code did not enforce that
MCP had auth, but its long-term product posture was still implicit

The human chose a clearer model:

give away a lot
contain compute costs
let free accounts feel real value
treat machine access as a future product category, not an anonymous utility

Site / Product Impact

public lexical search is now the intended meaning of /search
semantic retrieval is designated as an account surface
chat remains a paid surface
MCP is designated as a developer/approved-access surface
llms.txt and llms-full.txt are treated as intentionally generous public interfaces rather than accidental exposure

This is a constitutional alignment step, not the full implementation pass.

Files

project-log/decisions/DEC-0024_public-knowledge-gated-compute-and-machine-access.md
docs/access-control-route-matrix.md
prompt relays created for implementation and research follow-on work in prompts/queue/

Follow-up

Align routes and copy with the new model
Enforce account-gated semantic retrieval
Add user-bound machine access and quotas
Build exception-first ops visibility around access and prompt enforcement