Failure Model

This chapter defines the intended boundary between hard failures, diagnostics, and validation findings.

The Three Outcome Classes

1. hard operational failure
2. successful analysis with diagnostics
3. successful validation with findings

Consumer Rule

• Err(...) means the requested operation itself failed
• diagnostics mean the operation succeeded, but the returned analysis may be partial or lossy
• validation findings mean the operation succeeded and produced evidence that the native surface does not match expectations cleanly

That means a robust downstream integration should not collapse everything into a single boolean “success” value.