Apply the documentation voice rules to ARCHITECTURE.md

[techmanual-ai]

I applied the "Documentation Voice" rules (§7 of docs/agent_docs/agent_development.md, added in #6) to docs/ARCHITECTURE.md. It's one commit that changes 214 lines, well under the 600-line cap, so every section is done and nothing is left for a follow-up.

What changed

• Em-dashes (rule 7.9): down from 83 to 10. Most sat between a label and its definition, as in **\lablink/base.py`** — all type definitions…`. Each of those now uses a verb ("holds", "reads", "is the…"), a colon, or a bold label ending in a period.

  • Kept: the ten that set off a real aside or mark a sudden turn, including the paired dashes in the §17 intro and the aside inside the §8.4 redaction sentence. Also kept: the two in the §7.2 and §7.3 headings, and the ones in the directory-tree and TOML code comments, because headings and code blocks are frozen.

• Antithesis closers (rule 7.2): removed where the "not X" half denied something nobody had claimed:

  • "accepted by design, not silently relied upon" (§8.4)
  • "the safety net, not the front line" (§8.4)
  • "not a silent third option" (§9)

  Kept where the contrast is real: "not hide them" in §15.4 (the other callers do hide the error), "not a driver method" in §17.1, and "code-sharing contract, not a tool-uniformity contract" in §6.

• Sentences that repeated the line before them: removed "Honest, per-protocol names beat one overloaded surface" and "diagnose() is the agent's oracle" (§2), and the "The practical implications:" lead-in (§10).

• Participial tails and long sentences (rules 7.4, 7.7): split into shorter sentences in §1, §8, §8.4, §9, §10 and §17.4, for example "…, deferred until real demand surfaces" and "Centralizing it at the single write point means…".

• A few paragraphs in §4 and §7.3 that I edited were reflowed to the file's usual 80-column width.

Left alone: §3, §6.2, §7.1, §7.4, §7.5, §8.3, §11 and §14 already read cleanly. I also didn't touch the long single lines in §15; I only edited within them.

Content is frozen

A script compared the file against HEAD and found every heading, code block and table row byte-identical. No section was renumbered, reordered or merged, so references like "docs/ARCHITECTURE.md §8.3" in lablink/*.py still point to the right place. Every data model, driver-contract rule, dispatch rule and invariant still says the same thing.

Assumptions

• Removing restated paragraphs: none of the prose next to code blocks only repeated the block, so I removed no such paragraphs. For example, the §8 intro explains why the three-way lookup exists, which the code block alone doesn't say.
• Commit trailer: I used Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5, as this task's instructions specified.
• No CHANGELOG entry: the task said to skip it, since no behavior changes.

Tests

.venv/bin/python -m pytest -q passed with 386 tests before and after the change.

Noticed but not changed (content, out of scope)

• The §3 directory tree doesn't list lablink/redaction.py, although §4 describes it.
• In the §3 tree, demo/ is drawn as a second └── under interfaces/. It's actually a sibling of interfaces/ inside lablink/.

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🤖 Generated with Claude Code