# ecosystem law


An ecosystem law is a rule promoted above any single project. Most fixes live where the problem appeared: a patched module, a corrected config, a lesson filed in one repo's notes. An ecosystem law is what you write when the failure class is general and quietly waiting everywhere else, so the fix has to be too. Once ratified, every project inherits it automatically, including projects that have not hit the problem yet.

The first one came from a durability audit: once an ID is written down outside a database, the database has to keep that ID meaning the same thing forever. No project asked for that rule. Every project needed it. That gap, between where a defect is discovered and where its class actually lives, is exactly what the law mechanism exists to close.