Conflict reports

Flag: --audit (or --compute).

The conflict report is the mirror’s flagship: it surfaces where what you asserted disagrees with what your own structure implies. It ships the conflict; it never auto-corrects.

A separate channel

Conflicts are not diagnostics. Diagnostics judge a document’s form (is it well-formed?). Conflicts judge its coherence (do your beliefs hang together?). A document can be perfectly strict-clean and still carry a conflict — that’s the interesting case. So conflicts ride their own channel, in an audit section, and never affect strict parsing.

"audit": {
  "conflicts": [
    { "kind": "confidence-vs-status", "severity": "error",
      "subjects": ["ops-agent-holds-cache-is-safe", "cache-is-safe"],
      "message": "`ops-agent` asserts confidence 0.90 in `cache-is-safe`, but your own structure defeats it (argument status: out)" }
  ]
}

Each conflict has a kind, a severity (error / warning / info), the subjects it concerns, and a human-readable message.

confidence-vs-status

It compares each authored stance’s confidence against the grounded argument status of its target. Two cases fire:

(A confidence range is taken at its midpoint. Stances on targets that don’t take part in the attack graph are not compared.)

The first case is the flagship — you wrote down the objection and believed the claim anyway. The second is the inverse tell — you’re underweighting something your own evidence upholds.

It reports; it does not decide

This is worth stating plainly, because it’s the whole design. When the mirror finds a confidence-vs-status conflict, it does not:

• lower your confidence,
• flip the argument status,
• or tell you which one is right.

Maybe the structure is incomplete (a missing rebuttal would change the status). Maybe the confidence is the honest number and the structure overstates the attack. The mirror can’t know — you do. It just makes the disagreement impossible to miss.

The bundled ship-the-hotfix.thml exists precisely to demonstrate this: clean document, real conflict, no verdict.

definition-divergence

The second conflict type catches a different kind of disagreement: the same focus defined more than once with differing content.

{ "kind": "definition-divergence", "severity": "warning",
  "subjects": ["launch-date"],
  "message": "`launch-date` is defined more than once with differing content; all 2 definitions are kept" }

Ordinarily a repeated focus id merges (first-wins on body / quantity / formula). But when a later mention states a genuinely different value, ThoughtML does not drop it — every alternative is retained on the focus’s divergent list, and this conflict points at the disagreement. It’s the lossless-authoring tell: two agents (or two of your own passes) wrote down incompatible versions of the same thing, and the mirror asks you to reconcile them rather than picking one silently.

More conflict types are coming

confidence-vs-status and definition-divergence are the first two. The conflict report is built as an extensible channel; future readings (calibration drift, numeric inconsistency, stale beliefs) will land here as additional kinds — each one a disagreement surfaced, never a decision made.