A list of every claim your company stands behind — one line each, with a named owner and the date it was last checked — that an agent must read before it repeats one. It is the thing that lets software tell true last Tuesday from true eighteen months ago, which no amount of prompting can.
We are naming it because the thing does not have a name yet and teams keep building half of it. If you have a spreadsheet of approved claims with a column for who confirmed it, you have started one.
A datasheet goes stale as a document. Something in it stops being true, the document is still broadly right, and nobody can tell which line went wrong — so either the whole thing is suspect or none of it is.
A register goes stale one line at a time, visibly, with a name attached. That single change is what makes the rest possible: an agent can ask about one claim, a person can be reminded about one claim, and a report can say nine lines are overdue and here is whose.
| current | owned, and checked inside its interval. An agent may repeat it |
| overdue | the interval lapsed. Nothing was written when it did — the state is derived, because a stored current becomes a lie the moment an interval passes with nobody looking |
| unowned | nobody is named. Not blocked, not an error — unavailable |
| contested | two people disagree, and both sides stay readable until somebody resolves it |
The last three are all unusable, and they behave identically on purpose: the agent escalates and tells the buyer it is checking. That is what makes them one case for an agent to handle rather than three.
An owner is a person, not a team. Someone in product would know is a blank, and a blank owner is a result rather than a gap to be papered over.
A claim with no owner is unavailable rather than refused. The difference matters: an error is something somebody routes around, and an unavailable claim is something somebody wants to fill in.
Being overdue is not an event. Nothing is written when an interval lapses. Resist the urge to add a status-change record — it follows from the state being computed rather than stored, and storing it is how the register starts lying.
A certification is the exception that proves the rule. It has no interval: it has a date somebody else set, and renewal takes months. So it reminds on a fixed horizon rather than a proportion.
An afternoon, on the evidence we have. One run, thirty claims about a product the person knew well: 26 lines, 60 to 90 minutes, an owner against every row. That is one person and one company — it is evidence rather than a benchmark, and the second half of the question is still open: nobody has yet been asked whether owners keep re-confirming their lines, which is the part that decides whether this stays true in month six.
The most useful finding from that run was not the time. The person filling it in reported no line a customer would trouble them about. A second reader found four in ten minutes: a borrowed certification, two absolutes, and an undated roadmap commitment. The gap between what you believe about your own claims and what is true is the whole argument, and it is only visible from outside.
It reads the claim's state before it cites it, and the state it is told is ours rather than its own recollection — which is the one field a caller has every reason to get wrong. Each use is recorded against the claim and its version, so what did the agent rely on in January has an answer even though the claim has been amended twice since.
/docs.md connects an agent to one. /compare.md is how this sits beside the guardrail and observability tools.