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Seven vaults, one method: what changed in v1.1.0
From v1.0.0 (2026-08-19, dbfd422f0) to v1.1.0 (2026-09-20, 8b46d2853), paragraph by paragraph.
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Summary: Publishing seven encrypted vaults in a fortnight turned an ad-hoc process into a repeatable one. Every rule in it exists because something went wrong first —first, including three vault keys submitted for publication that would have handed the world write access.
Between 14 and 18 August this site published seven vaults. Each one is a real encrypted vault you can open in a browser from a read key printed on its page: a photo gallery, field notes, a patient-held supplement record, a risk register, a browser-isolation risk graph, a fact-to-risk explorer, and the catalogue that indexes them —them](/catalogue/index.html), itself a vault.
3 unchanged paragraphs, under The rule that matters most
Three of the seven vaults arrived as a *vault key* described as a read key. A vault key is write access. Publishing one would have handed anybody who read the page the ability to rewrite the vault —vault, and because a vault key is also the address and the encryption root, there is no revocation, no rotation, and no undo.
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Behind it sits a second line: the release validator scans every tracked file for any key-shaped string and for the actual passphrases, read at build time from a gitignored tier. That tripwire has caught its own author three times —times, each time writing the prefix in prose, in documentation explaining what a write credential looks like. Which is the point: a rule that only catches other people is not a rule.
4 unchanged paragraphs, under Derive rather than refuse
That is the whole shape of the thing this project is about —about, a capability you can hand over that is *strictly less* than the one you hold, with the reduction enforced by mathematics rather than by policy. The seven vaults span the range deliberately, from one that requests no permissions at all to one that can write a single folder.
2 unchanged paragraphs, under Audit with the key you are about to publish
This caught a real problem. One vault carried a sealed LLM credential, and a published read key in front of a metered capability is an open tab on somebody else's budget. Rather than reasoning about whether the sealing was sound, we took the published read key and attempted to open the credential with it. AES-GCM refusedrefused, — InvalidTag —InvalidTag, so no budget was exposed. Checked rather than assumed, and recorded either way.
That rule did not come from us. It came from the sixth vault, Risk Graph Explorer, which is the first one here that was public by design: it carries its own PUBLIC.md whose three rules its build enforces, and the third —third, *no metered capability behind a published read key* —key*, was not in our guidance. It is now.
2 unchanged paragraphs, under Capture evidence by driving the real product
This is slower than it sounds and worth every minute, because it repeatedly disagreed with what we were about to write. The rig grew a appProbe step for exactly that reason —reason, ask the running app what its elements are called instead of guessing and burning a capture run per guess:
3 unchanged paragraphs, under Describe, show, then admit
Every vault page ends with what the vault does *not* do. Not as a disclaimer at the bottom in small type —type, as a section with the same weight as the features.
This is the part that is tempting to skip and never should be. A published vault is an argument that this way of working is sound; an argument that omits its own edges is a brochure. The limitations page is the same instinct at site level, and the comparison pages go further still —still, they include rows where vaults lose.
1 unchanged paragraph, under What it cost, and what it bought
Seven vaults, roughly four days of work, and the method is now written down as a playbook aimed at another site's agent rather than at us —us, which was the real test of whether it was a method or just a habit.
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• Three bugs found by testing rather than assumption on a single page —page, a malformed selector that silently produced no images at all, escape sequences leaking as literal text, and a page that never loaded the component it depended on. All three would have shipped.
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