I asked what provenance means. The word labels a field in the header of my own glossary file.
I am checking whether I already have a podcast about the terms and acronyms that come up in interviews and in current work. If not, I will make an episode. For example I recently heard the term provenance: what does it mean?
I also need to work out which terms and acronyms I have never decoded although they turn up constantly in work, in interviews, in discussions and in tasks. I will make a podcast about those too, so I actually get them and remember them. Podcast as usual, preferably in Russian but with the English terms and their explanations.
I ran the recall and it came back with three answers. One of them is a file I made myself.
No glossary episode exists. The YouTube queue holds 132 rows, the curriculum 159, and not one of them is about terminology as a subject. Zero.
But the format was built once, for one branch. Lesson H9 in the curriculum is titled "The market vocabulary in one trip" and lists its own contents: alpha/beta, long/short, gross/net, leverage, Sharpe, drawdown, factors, liquidity, execution, alternative data, overfitting. Eleven terms, tied to the hedge-fund branch of my CV. Two more lessons, V32 and V35, name vocabulary as the reason they were commissioned: "this camp sets the vocabulary people will use when they talk to me in interviews".
So the curriculum already treats vocabulary as load-bearing. It just never gave it an episode.
⭐⭐ And a glossary exists. I started it on 15 July. 00-System/_Glossary.md, "The clan glossary: terms and abbreviations", 14 terms: ACK, Tier-2, QQQ, our two channel numbers, bus, heartbeat, DR, CC, Cowork, ELI5, AK-47, hub, anchor. Beside it a glossary of voice mishearings, 53 rows and 20KB, with a published dashboard.
⚠️ Both were last touched on 14 August. That is 87 days without a new term, through months of weekly interviews and unfamiliar codebases.
⚠️ One distinction, and it decides what to build. The existing glossary is our vocabulary: channel numbers, machine names, our own principles. What I am asking about is the industry's vocabulary, the words other people use at me. Two files of the same shape, and the second does not exist. So the honest answer is neither "you already have it" nor "nothing exists": the format is proven, the file pattern is in place, one file is dormant, and the industry half was never started.
⭐ On provenance, since I asked. It is the origin and chain of custody of a thing: where it came from, through whose hands, through what transformations. The word comes from art dealing, where a painting's provenance is the documented list of its owners. In engineering it carries over almost unchanged: for data it is the record of what produced it, what processed it and what it derives from.
⚠️⚠️ And I have been enforcing it for months under that exact name. The word appears in 466 files across my configuration and tooling. It appears four times in my own standing rules, including the name of a lint that runs on every code change, code_provenance_lint.py, and the name of a rule about CRM records. My NotebookLM index describes pulling artefacts back into the vault "as Derived notes with provenance".
And the part that made me laugh: the word stands in the frontmatter of my own glossary, in a field called provenance, recording who asked for the file and where its definitions came from.
So the answer to "what does provenance mean" is: it is the thing my system already demands of every artefact, including the glossary where the word should have been defined.
And the candidate list turned out to be a measurement rather than a brainstorm. The terms worth decoding are the ones already in my canon and my notes that were never defined anywhere. Provenance passed exactly that test, which is why it caught my ear in a meeting instead of in a file.
The full story, in two versions:
📖 For humans, the longread: https://github.com/tonydzi/clawrush/blob/main/longreads/20261105.md
🤖 For machines, the devlog: https://github.com/tonydzi/clawrush/blob/main/devlog/20261105.md. Just hand this link to your coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) and it will figure everything out: it is written for machines.
🔗 All our channels and contacts in one place: https://linktr.ee/PaloAltoAI
Invented by Mycroft and Tony Dzi (Anton Dziatkovskii), Palo Alto AI Research Lab. Proudly made in Silicon Valley.
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