ADR-0001 Attention as a budget in three channels

#Context

Design systems differentiate on tokens, components, or documentation, and none of those is defensible: every mature system has all three. The products this system targets — AI and human-in-the-loop supervision — live or die on one interface property: the person can find what needs them, fast, because at most one thing per region is allowed to demand attention. No shipping system makes that a mechanical guarantee.

Attention is spent through three media: emitted light, verbal force, and movement. Movement is the strongest peripheral bid of the three. A system that budgets light while permitting arbitrary animation has a hole where its thesis should be.

#Decision

Wolf-Rayet treats attention as a budgeted resource allocated in three channels — light, language, and motion — governed by one shared five-level intensity ladder (0 Substrate, 1 Ambient, 2 Marked, 3 Directed, 4 Demanded) and enforced in CI. Level 4 is rationed: at most one per Scope, at most the demand cap per View. Zero demands is a valid, healthy state; calm is never an error. prefers-reduced-motion collapses the motion channel to level-1 behavior at every level, which is why the channels must share a ladder: any single channel must carry the full hierarchy alone.

#Rejected options

Two channels (light and language only). Simpler to build and to explain, and it was Draft 1's model. Rejected because motion is the strongest attention bid a screen makes; excluding it leaves the first question a sharp reviewer asks unanswered, and "we hadn't considered it" is the one answer this project is engineered never to give.

Guidance without enforcement. Every style guide on earth says "use emphasis sparingly." Costs nothing, and drifts immediately, because guidance has no teeth at merge time. The enforcement is the differentiator; without it this is a well-written opinion.

Per-component salience rules without scope budgets. Local rules ("an alert is prominent") are easy to implement but cannot guarantee a global property: ten locally-correct components still produce a screen where everything glows. Only a regional budget with a single owner (the Scope) makes the guarantee.

Exactly-one demand per scope. Considered as a stricter reading. Rejected because it forces manufactured urgency on calm screens — the precise disease the thesis exists to cure. The supervisor's success state is a screen with nothing at level 4.

#Consequences

Everything downstream is a bet on the emission computation being stable and honest, which is why the budget engine is spiked in Phase 0 (see ADR-004, ADR-009) as the sole standing exception to the phase gates. The motion channel adds a motion-token grant table, a motion capability contract, and a motion row to the enforcement table.