Core Concepts

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---
schema: foundry-doc-v1
title: "Substrate"
slug: substrate-index
category: substrate
type: topic
quality: complete
short_description: "The substrate category collects the platform's foundational mechanism concepts — the Compounding Substrate, Apprenticeship Substrate, Citation Substrate, Disclosure Substrate, Trajectory Substrate, Language Protocol Substrate, and the disciplines and primitives that compose them — each describing a structural property the platform relies on rather than a specific service or system."
status: active
bcsc_class: public-disclosure-safe
last_edited: 2026-05-09
editor: pointsav-engineering
paired_with: _index.es.md
---

The **substrate** category collects the platform's foundational mechanism concepts. Each substrate names a structural property the platform relies on — not a specific service or system, but a pattern that composes services, systems, and content into a coherent whole.

The category answers questions like: *what makes the platform improve continuously without surrendering data ownership? what makes citations machine-auditable? what makes disclosures structurally compliant? what makes contributor work feed back into model training?* The articles here describe the mechanisms; the architecture, services, and systems categories describe how they're realised in concrete components.

## Reading order

Start with [[compounding-substrate]] for the canonical pattern PointSav stewards. Then read [[apprenticeship-substrate]] (how editorial verdicts feed continued pretraining), [[citation-substrate]] (how every claim resolves to an authoritative source), and [[disclosure-substrate]] (how forward-looking statements remain BCSC-compliant by structure).

For the implementation primitives that substrates compose: [[adapter-composition]] (how request adapters compose), [[mcp-substrate-protocol]] (the machine-readable protocol surface), [[merkle-proofs-as-substrate-primitive]] (the cryptographic foundation), [[meta-repo-pattern]] (the repository topology).

## See also

- [[architecture]] — cross-cutting platform architecture
- [[patterns]] — named design patterns realised on top of substrates