Provenance
Every piece of committed work in Stella Loop carries an immutable chain of references back to what motivated it. When someone asks “why are we building this?”, the answer is a chain of records, not an archaeology project.
The chain
epic → proposal → report → intent [→ signal → external source]- The intent records what fired it — a trigger event, a seed from prior learnings, a person, or a signal.
- Every analyzer run and report records its intent and run.
- Every proposal records its source report(s). Provenance is mandatory and immutable — even hand-written proposals anchor to a report.
- Promotion passes the full chain into the epic, where it is surfaced on every view.
- Tasks extend it further: task → spec revision → candidate → epic.
- Signals extend it end to end: a support ticket is traceable to the merged change that resolved it — and the loop can answer back with a resolution notice.
A worked example, navigable in both directions:
SIG-238 → INT-31 → RPT-41 → PRP-19 → EPC-12 → TSK-214A Slack message seeded an intent; the intent’s UX walkthrough produced a report; the report yielded a proposal; the proposal was promoted into an epic; the epic decomposed into tasks. Six records, one question answered.
Display IDs
Every entity kind carries a human-readable sequence ID, used consistently across the UI, the CLI, the API, and even pull-request titles:
| Prefix | Entity | Scope |
|---|---|---|
SIG-n |
Signal | Organization |
INT-n |
Intent | Project |
RPT-n |
Report | Project |
PRP-n |
Proposal | Project |
EPC-n |
Epic | Project |
TSK-n |
Task | Project |
Display IDs are first-class addresses: stella epic show EPC-12 and GET /api/v1/projects/{p}/epics/EPC-12 resolve them directly, global search jumps to them exactly, and Stella-managed pull requests are titled [EPC-12] … with a provenance block in the body linking back.
Why it matters
- Decisions stay justified. Promotion approvals show the evidence chain, so the person holding the gate sees why the work exists before spending on it.
- Agents get real context.
stella context show TSK-214walks the chain to assemble the intent, the North Star lines, the spec, and the reports — the same context a senior teammate would give. - Feedback closes. Because the chain reaches the original signal, shipping the fix can notify the person who reported the problem — automatically, once, with a privacy-safe message.
- History cannot be falsified. References are immutable, run history renders from point-in-time snapshots, and renames or deletions cannot rewrite what actually happened.