# Product Boundary and Release Authority Decision

- **Status:** Accepted
- **Date:** 2026-08-20
- **Scope:** Photo-assisted bowel logging and release governance

## Context

Timmy can make a conservative visual suggestion from a user-selected image, but the available general-purpose model is not clinically validated. The product must preserve manual logging, deterministic red-flag escalation, and user control regardless of model availability or output.

## Decision

### Observable AI fields

AI may suggest only:

- visible Bristol form (Types 1–7);
- broad color;
- image quality.

Every suggestion is provisional, may abstain, and requires user review or correction before it can enter the journal. Symptoms remain user-entered, and journal saving is separate from training contribution consent.

### Prohibited inferences

AI must not infer or claim disease, bleeding, pain, urgency, fever, vomiting, treatment, causation, or whether a food is safe. It must not replace professional care, suppress deterministic red-flag escalation, or present a suggestion as a diagnosis.

### Release authority

Hermes/Timmy is the release authority for routine engineering, test, build, deployment, and release-candidate preparation. Automated evidence must remain reproducible and must not overstate model accuracy or safety.

### Human gates

Human gates are limited to:

1. clinical and privacy review when language or policy crosses those boundaries;
2. beta consent before participation;
3. RC approval before shipping a release candidate.

Routine provisioning, deployment, label sweeps, and release-candidate assembly are not human-operated gates.

## Consequences

- Model output is assistive and fail-closed, never authoritative.
- A generic open-weight VLM can support bootstrap experiments but cannot become the production Bristol classifier without the documented calibration and evaluation evidence.
- Release evidence and demonstrations must use fictional or synthetic data and state the non-diagnostic boundary honestly.

## Evidence and governing references

- [Product brief and safety boundary](../PRODUCT.md)
- [AI execution evidence](../AI-EVIDENCE.md)
- [Sovereign vision decision and measured limitations](../research/SELF-HOSTED-STOOL-VISION.md)