KCAE.CHANGE:4.4 - Separate historical coherence from current authority

A pinned historical generation can be perfectly coherent and no longer govern today’s action. Mark the requested use: historical explanation, current recommendation or comparison across editions. Before a consequential current recommendation is used, check the authority/currentness condition required by the use. If it changed, reopen the affected judgement against the new source. A user-visible old answer needs a stale or superseded disposition where continued reliance matters.

A failed vector update need not force stale advice. Use the new generation’s exact or lexical route, a direct source scan, or a qualified unchanged subset whose dependency boundary is known. Advertise that route’s scope. If no adequate current route remains, return an availability limitation. Keeping an old generation online is a service rollback; it does not make an old rule current again.

If users edit sources while the prepared view lags, either construct a new snapshot before serving those edits or expose a delta layer: exact current additions and changes plus tombstones for removed old material, with an explicit combined membership and conflict rule. The merge must remove obsolete hits and open the selected current edition. A silent mixture of edited files and an old index is not an incremental profile.