CAT-ALIGN-001: align veip-spec with controlling Veraxis category thesis

[veraxis-protocol]

Scope

Documentation only, additive. README.md gains two sections; nothing is removed or reworded.

1. A standard Role in Open Institutional Computation block immediately under the title, naming the category, this component's role, what must already exist upstream, what it serves downstream, and the canonical category thesis.
2. A VEIP's position in the architecture subsection immediately after the Overview, stating what VEIP does and — critically — what it does not do.

Why

The current README opens as a deterministic execution-control standard and moves quickly to execution authorization and evidence packaging. That is accurate, but it lets an external reader (including an AI asked to summarize this repository) conclude that VEIP is defined by its Evidence Pack, or that VEIP itself establishes institutional authority. Both conclusions have been observed externally.

This PR fixes the upstream boundary in prose so the specification is read in its actual position: downstream of institutional authority formation, upstream of enforcement and evidence.

Files changed

• README.md — 20 insertions, 0 deletions

What is explicitly preserved

• The 0.1.0 Public Working Draft banner and its breaking-change notice
• Foundational invariants 1–5, verbatim
• The Scope section, including what the specification does not govern
• CC BY 4.0 licensing and the separate trademark/certification position
• Versioning discipline and the specification document index
• All existing "Evidence Pack" schema terminology. schemas/veip-evidence-pack.schema.json is untouched. Nothing is renamed to "AEP" for messaging purposes; normative terminology changes only through this specification's own governance process.

Claim impact

None. The added block states an architectural role and immediately qualifies it: "Architectural role does not imply production readiness; see this repository's status, versioning, and conformance documentation for the exact demonstrated scope." No conformance, maturity, adoption or deployment claim is made or broadened. No enterprise adoption is asserted for any party.

No runtime change

No runtime semantics, code, schema, test, expected disposition, profile, release or historical artifact was changed. The diff touches one Markdown file and adds only prose.

Validation

• make schema → OK: schema JSON parses: schemas/veip-evidence-pack.schema.json (exit 0)
• make check → fails on main before this change and fails identically with it: Missing required file: LICENSE.md. The Makefile's required-file list includes both LICENSE and LICENSE.md; only LICENSE exists in the repository. This is a pre-existing base-branch failure, unrelated to category positioning, and is deliberately not fixed here — doing so would mean either adding a licence file or editing the Makefile, both outside this work order's bounded documentation scope. It is recorded in the CAT-ALIGN-001 census for separate disposition.

Expect CI on this PR to be red for that pre-existing reason only.

• Base SHA: b7bae309cd39b6be2f1669aff75c4feb9cf18668
• Head SHA: 26db2538f1913637a242b0730de6866f5943b408

Controlling thesis

veraxis-protocol/institutional-continuity#2 — Veraxis Category Thesis v1.0. Canonical location after merge: https://github.com/veraxis-protocol/institutional-continuity/blob/main/THESIS.md

DCO

Commit is signed off.

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Generated by Claude Code

[veraxis-protocol]

CI is red, and it is not this PR's failure

Failing check: checks — run 34284166781

Missing required file: LICENSE.md
make: *** [Makefile:11: check] Error 1

Why it isn't this PR's. The check target requires both LICENSE and LICENSE.md:

req=(README.md LICENSE LICENSE.md GOVERNANCE.md VERSIONING.md VIP_PROCESS.md schemas/veip-evidence-pack.schema.json)

git ls-tree origin/main lists only LICENSE. LICENSE.md has never existed on this branch, so make check fails identically on main — I reproduced it locally on the unmodified base before opening this PR, which is why the PR description predicted this failure.

This PR's entire diff is README.md, +20 lines of prose, 0 deletions. It cannot affect a required-file check.

No fix ported, and why. Two fixes exist — add a LICENSE.md, or drop it from the Makefile's required list. Both are repository-hygiene or licensing changes, not category positioning, and both fall outside the bounded documentation scope authorized by work order CAT-ALIGN-001. Widening this PR to carry one would be exactly the scope creep that work order forbids. It is recorded in the CAT-ALIGN-001 census for separate disposition and raised with the owner.

No re-run. A re-run is for confirming a suspected flake. This failure is deterministic — a file either exists in the tree or it does not — and re-running would tell us nothing we haven't already proven locally.

make schema passes, before and after this change.

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Generated by Claude Code