Saphan

Discovery — understanding as a deliverable.

You hand over a system nobody fully understands anymore — often several repositories, several platforms. Discovery sends governed, read-only reconnaissance across it and returns an evidence-cited understanding: what it is built from, how it is wired, where the risks sit, and what you now have to decide. Nothing is changed. The deliverable is knowing.

How it behaves

Read-only, governed, priced

Reconnaissance never changes anything: no code, no fixes, no decisions made on your behalf. Discovery produces understanding as a record artifact — priced before it runs, gated like every other work, and signed when you accept it.

Every claim carries its citation

Findings point at the file and the line they came from, so a claim can be checked without trusting the agent that wrote it. And where the evidence runs out, the report says could not verify — never a guess. A version pinned in a manifest is a fact; “probably the latest” is fabrication.

Secrets never leave their files

A credential found in a legacy repo is reported as a location and a kind — never as a value. The reconnaissance that maps your system is held to the same secrets discipline as the rest of Saphan Studio.

What comes back

Per-repository briefs that answer what you would otherwise learn only by putting a senior engineer inside for a month: what is in here, what it is built with, where it starts, how it builds and tests, how the repositories talk to each other, what is wrong or risky, and what you must decide. Plus a cross-repo synthesis for the places where those answers disagree.

What it opens

The ratified understanding feeds the decisions that become the engagement’s canon — the record every later piece of work is authored from. Discovery opens; Studio operates.

Status, honestly

The method is proven — it ran in real engagements on the previous generation of this discipline, and the verb is already registered in the CLI. What remains is the port: re-seating Discovery on Saphan Protocol, so the engine enforces what discipline used to merely ask for.

This page will say “shipped” when it ships — not one release before.

More of Saphan Studio

Controls — what is in place, control by control →Governance — decisions on the record →Security — untrusted agents, provable runs →Cost — quoted, capped, attributed →

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