/method/external-workflow-artifact
Public method explainer
The External Workflow Artifact ladder is how GARP looks at a foreign or generated artifact without treating it as a record. The adapter turns "something showed up" into a sequence of deterministic boundary artifacts. Each rung carries strictly less authority than a record: an artifact can be observed, inspected, and proposed as context, and a future receipt can be previewed, all without anything being admitted, verified, or executed.
This page explains how GARP can inspect foreign and generated artifacts without treating them as records. The adapter creates deterministic boundary artifacts that describe what was seen, never asserting that the artifact is true, owned, or admitted. The ladder ends at a receipt-candidate, which is only a proposal of what a future receipt would need to bind.
The ladder does not connect to any product, read a knowledge vault, run a model, call retrieval, write a receipt, build a ContextPacket, or admit anything. Every rung is read-only and deterministic over the artifact in front of it. Inspection is description, not endorsement, and a candidate is a proposal, not a decision.
Each rung is a boundary artifact the adapter produces deterministically from the rung below it. Authority never increases as you climb; it only becomes more explicit about what would be required for the artifact to ever matter.
foreign artifact
A file or piece of generated text that originates outside GARP. It is just bytes. It is not a record, and generated text is not a record no matter how confident it reads.
ExternalWorkflowEvent
The adapter notes, deterministically, that a foreign artifact was observed at the boundary. The event describes the encounter; it does not open, trust, or ingest the artifact, and source presence is not truth.
ExternalWorkflowInspection
A read-only, deterministic inspection of the artifact's shape and surface structure. Inspection records what is there. It does not verify the contents, and inspection is not admission.
ExternalWorkflowContextCandidate
A proposal that the inspected artifact could serve as context. It is a candidate, not a ContextPacket, and any retrieval score it carries is a relevance hint only. Retrieval score is not admission.
ExternalWorkflowReceiptCandidate
A receipt-candidate is only a proposal and preview of what a future receipt would need to bind. It is not a receipt and nothing is emitted. It names the obligations a real receipt would have to satisfy before any record could exist.