Approval and Apply Semantics

Truthound AI separates suggestion from mutation.

Lifecycle States

Proposal lifecycle is explicit:

• pending
• approved
• rejected
• applied

applied is terminal. Repeated transitions to the same state are treated as no-op operations rather than noisy duplicate events.

Why Approval Exists

The system is designed around human review:

• proposals are reviewable before mutation
• analyses are read-only operational aids
• mutation only happens through explicit apply

This is why apply_proposal(...) only accepts proposals already marked approved.

Apply Target

Applied suites are not stored under .truthound/ai/. They become part of the active validation configuration surface:

• .truthound/suites/index.json
• .truthound/suites/<source_key_hash>.json

That separation matters because applied suites are runtime state, not just AI review artifacts.

Runtime Merge Policy

When an applied suite is merged into the deterministic auto-suite:

• exact duplicates are skipped
• same validator/columns with different params favor the applied check
• explicit validators= on th.check(...) bypasses applied-suite merging

This keeps the human-approved path explicit and predictable.