HowHow Basic: a project-local research control plane

HowHow Basic is the deterministic, project-local control mode. It is deliberately a CLI rather than a daemon or a web application. When Reasoner Mode is used, the conversational Servant owns interpretation and human interaction; the repository still owns durable filesystem records, hashes, append-only events, checkpoints, evidence audits, experiment manifests, LaTeX builds and source packaging.

That split is the whole design. If the agent owned state, then swapping the agent would mean losing the record. If a provider owned state, the same would be true of swapping the provider. Keeping canonical state in a project directory means either can be replaced without the evidence trail moving.

The consequence is that commands are short-lived and local. There is no network, model, database, daemon or hidden worker required for local operation. Network retrieval, when enabled, uses official endpoints and records the raw response.

The deterministic ClaimLedger fixture verifies product mechanics from an empty temporary project through package rebuild and tamper rejection. It is explicitly non-scientific: no real autonomous research episode and no human scientific review is claimed anywhere in it.