## The diamond-cutting discipline

The principle the patent-triage pipeline runs on. Every phase grounds in this distinction.

### Empty vs invariant

- The **empty** part of an idea is its *representation*: the vocabulary, the file format, the programming language, the library, the vendor, the specific implementation. Empty does not mean unimportant — it means re-statable without loss.
- The **invariant** part is the *territory*: the single plane the idea splits the world along — what may be practiced freely and what is excluded.

Claims are vehicles. What an inventor owns is not the claim's words; it is the territory the words exclude from public practice. Many phrasings would bound the same territory with the same fidelity. The words are a surveyor's stake; the land is what gets enforced.

### The two errors

- **Welding to the representation.** A claim welded to a specific hash function, library, or vendor looks precise but shatters when the representation ages out, while the territory it was meant to hold never moved. Hard is not tough.
- **Drifting from the invariant.** Treating the territory as something to restate loosely. The stake still stands but no longer marks land anyone would fight over. Broad enough to read onto prior art, or so narrow a competitor walks around it.

The ideal is the narrow band of scope at which the cleave clears the prior art and stays enabled — the broadest reach that still bounds.

### The four cuts (run in order, before drafting any claim language)

1. **Name the cleave in one sentence,** in plain language, stripped of any specific format, library, vendor, or programming language. If the sentence will not form, there is no invention yet — only an implementation description. (The point of novelty.)
2. **Name three to five things this is** *not.* Each is a piece of prior art that comes close but bounds a different space. These are sharper boundary markers than the cleave-description alone. (Distinguishing the art; negative limitations.)
3. **Name three ways the cleave could fail.** Where does the territory actually end? The abstractness objection, the enablement gap, the over-broad reading — the validity attack surface (§101 / §112). Naming them is the only way to know what you hold.
4. **Re-state the cleave in different representations.** Plain English, sketch, another language, pitch to a non-engineer. If a phrasing breaks it, that phrasing was load-bearing — refine until the cleave survives re-description. This is the doctrine of equivalents (*Graver Tank*) run in reverse: stress-test your own cleave against the very test a court would later use against an infringer.

Only after the four cuts do you write the claim.

### Cleave-grade vocabulary

- **TIGHT** — single sentence, one independent claim, ≤3 functional elements joined by `comprising`, every word load-bearing, an explicit distancing limitation when prior art names a close hit.
- **LOOSE** — survives re-statement but still carries representation-level load (a library name, a format, a vendor) that should be stripped. Drives REFINE-FIRST.
- **UNBOUNDED** — no single plane named; the claim reads broadly enough to anticipate or be anticipated. Drives REFINE-FIRST or NOT-FILEABLE depending on novelty.

### Triage verdict vocabulary

- **FILEABLE** — cleave is TIGHT, novelty PASS, ≥3 failure modes named with bounds, ≥5 what-this-is-NOT distinctions. A provisional-draft skeleton accompanies the verdict.
- **REFINE-FIRST** — one or more axes are marginal. The verdict names the axis (novelty / scope / clarity / enablement) and the refinement direction.
- **NOT-FILEABLE** — prior art anticipates, or no single-sentence claim can be drawn. The verdict cites the prior art (or the missing plane) in plain English.

### What this discipline excludes

- Vocabulary lock-in. Each phase's output must survive translation into a different representation. If swapping the library or vendor name breaks the claim, the claim was welded to the representation.
- Drafting before reading. The four cuts come before any claim language. A pipeline that drafts before reading is sawing across the grain.
- Verdicts without named axes. Every REFINE-FIRST names the axis; every NOT-FILEABLE cites the anticipating art or the missing plane; every FILEABLE attaches the draft skeleton.

*Know the empty from the invariant. Read before you cut. Name the plane, name what it is not, name where it breaks, restate it until it survives restating. Then strike once, cleanly, and let the words be only the stake.*