The constitution

Constitution

The sources of the constitution are in its edition directory, constitution/<YYYY-MM>/, today constitution/2026-10/: index.toml and one directory per article under articles/. The directory is named after the edition and keeps its name when the draft is approved; the status is recorded only in index.toml. The tools take the edition directory to be the one directory under constitution/ that holds an index.toml, and fail when there is none or more than one, so its name is written nowhere in them.

The constitution is compiled by uv run constitution-build, the workspace member tools/compiler (Python standard library only), from those sources. It writes two files for each language in index.toml to the edition directory’s generated/, constitution.<lang>.md (the full version) and constitution.<lang>.agent.md (the version for agents, see The version for agents), committed and never edited by hand; --check writes nothing and runs the checks under Checkers.

constitution/2026-10/
  index.toml
  articles/
    05-boundary-rule/
      article.toml
      01-must-ask.toml
      02-decide-yourself.toml
  generated/
    constitution.en.md  constitution.en.agent.md
    constitution.zh.md  constitution.zh.agent.md

index.toml:

• status: draft until a person first approves the text, then active.
• edition: the name of the edition, the month a principal approved it as in force, YYYY-MM; required. A draft names the edition it prepares, the month it is meant to be approved in; if it is approved in another month, the edition is renamed then. An edition is a whole version of the text, like a constitution named by the year it was adopted. Starting a new edition is itself an amendment and needs a principal’s approval, and at most one edition starts in a month, so no two share a name; within an edition, numbers never change (see Numbering), and a new edition may renumber freely.
• revision: a string, the revision within the edition: a draft is 0.<n>, with <n> counting from 1 in every draft (the first edition’s and each later one’s), the first approved text of an edition is 1, each adopted amendment adds one, and a new edition starts again at 1. The build manifest records it. Within an edition it rises exactly when the constitution text changes (Checkers, check 7).
• languages: the language codes, the first being the default. Each must have a rendering entry in the build script (one table, LANGUAGES, holds everything that differs by language: the file header, the shapes of headings, numbers and citations, the repealed note). Adding a language means adding one entry there and one key to every text table.
• [title]: the title, one line per language; the build adds the edition after it (see Numbering).
• [front]: the Markdown between the title and the first article (draft notice, ## Preamble and its text), per language. It may cite.

An article is a directory articles/<NN>-<id>/: its number, two digits from 01, a hyphen and its ID. In it, article.toml holds id (equal to the directory name without the number), [title], an optional [intro] (the paragraph between the heading and the first section) and, only when the whole article is repealed, repealed = "YYYY-MM".

Each section is a file <NN>[a-z]-<id>.toml in its article’s directory: its number, two digits from 01 with an optional lowercase letter, a hyphen, its ID and .toml. The section belongs to the article whose directory holds it; there is no field for it. The file holds id (equal to the file name without the number and .toml), status (draft, active or repealed), repealed = "YYYY-MM" exactly when the status is repealed, an optional audience = "maintainers" (its only value) for a provision on how the constitution itself is made, arranged and amended, and [content], the section’s text per language: the first line is the sentence after the section’s number, further lines, nested lists and blank lines follow as they are, and the build indents them under the list item.

A section with list items has one [[items]] table per item, in the section’s file: id, number (1, 2, 2a, within the section), status, repealed and audience as for a section, and [items.content], the item’s text per language. The section’s [content] then holds only the lead-in; the build renders the items below it in number order.

id = "must-ask"
status = "draft"

[content]
en = '''
**Must go through a principal** whose authority covers the item ({@explicit-yes}).
'''
zh = '''
**必须经过委托人**，即由权限覆盖该事项的委托人同意 ({@explicit-yes})。
'''

[[items]]
id = "capital"
number = "1"
status = "draft"

[items.content]
en = '''
Capital: allocating, spending, ...
'''
zh = '''
资本：资金和其他有价资源的配置……
'''

Article, section and item order come from the numbers alone; there is no separate list. While index.toml is draft, every section, item and rule is draft and nothing is repealed; once it is active, every section and item is active or repealed.

Numbering

Numbers are not derived from position. An article’s number is the prefix of its directory name and a section’s the prefix of its file name, written there and nowhere else; a list item’s is its number field. A section or item number is an integer with an optional lowercase letter suffix (2, 2a), the suffix marking one inserted later between 2 and 3; articles are only ever appended and take no suffix. Only after the first approved revision does an insertion take a suffix (<NN>a-<id>.toml); while the constitution is a draft, a new provision takes the next number in order and the ones after it are renumbered. A name prefix is that number with two digits (02, 02a), so the files sort in reading order. Sort order is by integer, then suffix: 2 < 2a < 2b < 3. Within one scope (all articles; the sections of one article; the items of one section) numbers are unique; a draft need not be contiguous.

From the first approved revision on, numbers follow stable-numbers within an edition; the check --check --base <git-ref> enforces it against a base commit of the same edition (see Checkers, check 7): renaming a directory or file to a new number, or moving a section to another article’s directory, is an error. A repealed provision is rendered as a one-line note in place of its text (table below). While the constitution is a draft, or when a new edition starts, numbers may change, directories and files are renamed with them, and the check only says that it did not compare.

Rendering, with must-ask as the first section of the fourth article, capital as its third item and authority as the article’s ID; <a id="must-ask"></a> is written ⟨must-ask⟩ in the table:

A list marker is padded to four characters, and the further lines of a section or an item, nested lists and paragraphs included, are indented to its content column: four spaces for a section, eight for an item. A section or an item whose text has a blank line in it is followed by a blank line. Python-Markdown nests only what is indented four spaces and joins a list line to the paragraph just above it; with this layout the output renders alike there and in CommonMark (GitHub) as long as a source text’s own nested blocks are indented four spaces and a list line after a paragraph has a blank line before it. A source text that breaks either still renders wrong in Python-Markdown; the constitution has none today.

An item citation renders short, as its item number alone ((4), (2a); 第四项, 第二项之一), when the text just before it is exactly one connector and the text before that is a citation of another item of the same section. A section citation renders short the same way, as its section number alone (§2, §1a; 第二款, 第一款之一), after a connector and a citation of another section of the same article. The connectors are or, and, , and to in English and 或, 和, 、 and 至 in Chinese; a range is written in the sources with to or 至 between its first and last citation. An item of another section, a section of another article, a citation after a citation one level up or down (an article and its section, a section and an item), and a citation with any other text before it keep the full path. The sources always write the full path.

Every article, section and item starts with an anchor named by its ID, not its number: <a id="<article-id>">, <a id="<section-id>"> and <a id="<section-id>.<item-id>"> (IDs). The anchors are the same in every language and survive renumbering; article and section IDs are unique in the whole constitution, so they do not collide. A citation is a link to its provision’s anchor, a short one too: [Art. IV §1][must-ask] and [§2][…], each number its own link. The links are reference links, with one definition [<ref>]: #<ref> per cited provision at the end of the file, in order of first citation: limae reads the ) of an inline link […](#…) followed by a Chinese character as a parenthesis that needs a space (limae 0.13.3, read 2026-10). Section numbers are bold; an item number is bold inside its parentheses, because limae asks for a space between ** and a parenthesis.

Each output starts with a plain-text paragraph, in its own language: generated file, do not edit it, edit the sources; and the revision, followed by (draft) ((草案)) while status is draft, and the language; in the full version, when a part has the asterisk (a provision marked for maintainers, or the preamble’s heading), also what the asterisk means: the parts marked are background for people, where the constitution comes from, how it is organized and how it is amended, and the version for agents omits them. Output is UTF-8 with LF line endings and a final newline, with no timestamp; the same sources give byte-identical output.

The version for agents

Agents read the constitution through the compiled instructions, where every token counts; the preamble and the provisions on how the constitution itself is made and amended matter to the people who maintain it and to an agent drafting an amendment, who reads the full version. So the build writes a second file per language, constitution.<lang>.agent.md, which differs from the full version in this:

• The header line says it is the version for agents, without the text of the provisions written for human readers.
• [front] (the draft notice and the preamble) is left out, so in the full version each heading in it, ## Preamble, has the asterisk after it. In its place is a note of the build script’s own, one sentence per language in LANGUAGES: that this is the version for agents, while index.toml is draft that the constitution is a draft that may be used on a trial basis but is not final, once active that every agent must follow it; that the preamble and the text of the provisions written for human readers, on how the constitution is organized and amended, are left out, with only a pointer to the full version in their place; and that before changing the constitution or the tools that build it, an agent reads the full version, named by its path. It is not the text of the constitution (see File structure).
• A section or item with audience = "maintainers" keeps its number and shows a note in place of its text: - **§2** (see the full text), - **第二款** (见完整版); a repealed one shows its repealed note as usual. In the full version the same provision keeps its text and has an asterisk after its number, **§2**<sup class="omitted">*</sup>, which the header line explains.
• There are no anchors and no link definitions: a citation is its label as plain text (Art. VIII §6, 第八条第六款), short where the full version is short.