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  • Status: accepted · Date: 2026-07-28 · Deciders: Davor Runje

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Context

The project shipped v0.1.0 (2026-07-19) and v0.1.1 (2026-07-21) as honest-scholar: a GitHub repo, a Claude Code plugin, a PyPI distribution, a CLI, and a docs site at honest-scholar.science. The name leads with honesty — a property of the researcher. The methodology leads with defensibility — a property of the work, and the thing the tool can actually verify. Every load-bearing mechanism is about defence: the exploration→resolution firewall (no skill both proposes a claim and adjudicates it), defend as a Socratic tutor-examiner, digest as its inbound counterpart, named human sign-off on every material decision. The tagline was already “research you can defend”. A new visual identity built on the QED tombstone (∎, “demonstrated”) made the mismatch plain. honest-scholar also overstates what the tool does. It cannot certify that research is honest — DISCLOSURE.md says so explicitly — and a name that implies otherwise is exactly the kind of unearned claim the project’s own voice rules reject.

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Decision drivers

  • The name should describe what the tool verifies, not a virtue it cannot audit.
  • Alignment with the new visual identity and the QED mark, already authored.
  • Cost of renaming rises monotonically with adoption; nine days after first release it is near its lifetime minimum.
  • Two artifacts version independently (ADR-0026), so the rename must not couple them.

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Considered options

  1. Rename everything to defendable-science, drop the old PyPI distributions with no forwarding release. (chosen)
  2. Keep honest-scholar. Zero cost, permanent mismatch between the name, the identity, and the methodology.
  3. Dual-name: rename the project, keep the distribution and CLI as honest-scholar. Avoids breaking installs, but leaves the most-typed identifier contradicting everything around it, and doubles the vocabulary a new contributor must learn.
  4. Rename with a forwarding release: publish a final honest-scholar version whose only content is a deprecation notice depending on defendable-science. Kinder to existing installs, but the population is very likely zero and the shim would outlive its usefulness on PyPI forever.

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Decision

Option 1. The full naming map is recorded in docs/superpowers/specs/2026-07-28-defendable-science-rename-design.md. In summary: repo, plugin, marketplace, PyPI + TestPyPI distribution, console script (defendable-science, short alias dsci, replacing hsch), Python module (defendable_science), project config dir (.defendable-science/), environment variables (DEFENDABLE_SCIENCE_*), commit trailer (DefendableScience-Skill:), and the docs home at defendable.science. Both artifacts move to 0.2.0 — a breaking change under 0.x. The alignment is coincidental; they continue to version independently. The word honest is retained as vocabulary. “Failure honesty”, “honest stop”, “an honest ledger”, and the honest AI use citation keyword are precise technical terms and are unaffected.

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Consequences

  • The old PyPI and TestPyPI distributions are abandoned with no forwarding release. Anyone who ran uv tool install honest-scholar is stranded at 0.1.1 with no in-band signal that the project moved. Mitigated only by this ADR, the CHANGELOG, and GitHub’s repo redirect.
  • Existing consumer repos break and must be migrated by hand:
    1. git mv .honest-scholar .defendable-science
    2. rename HONEST_SCHOLAR_KEYS_PATH → DEFENDABLE_SCIENCE_KEYS_PATH and HONEST_SCHOLAR_LIVE → DEFENDABLE_SCIENCE_LIVE wherever they are set
    3. update .gitignore entries pointing at .honest-scholar/
    4. reinstall the plugin: /plugin install defendable-science@defendable-science
    5. reinstall the CLI: uv tool uninstall honest-scholar, then uv tool install defendable-science
  • ADRs 0001–0034 were rewritten to the new name, trading some historical fidelity for a repo that reads as one coherent artifact. This ADR is the single place that records the former name.
  • The 0.1.0 and 0.1.1 CHANGELOG entries keep the old name verbatim. Those releases really did ship under it; rewriting them would be the kind of tidy lie the failure-honesty rule exists to prevent.
  • Two names had to be secured, and neither was held when the rename was designed. The defendable.science domain appeared registered in a registrar panel but was absent from the registry (RDAP 404); it was re-registered on 2026-07-28. A registrar panel is not evidence of registration; RDAP is. The defendable-science distribution on PyPI/TestPyPI remains unreserved — both indexes still 404 — and is an outstanding prerequisite that must be secured before the first release under the new name.

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Rejected alternatives

See Considered options 2–4 above. Option 4 was the closest call: it is strictly kinder to existing users, and was rejected only because the user population nine days after first release is very likely zero, and a permanent deprecation shim on PyPI is a lasting cost to avoid a transient one. docs/superpowers/specs/2026-07-28-defendable-science-rename-design.md (the full naming map this ADR defers to); docs/superpowers/plans/2026-07-28-defendable-science-rename.md (the implementation plan); resources/ensure-tooling.md (carries the compatibility pin this rename bumped); docs/design/visual-identity.md (the v2 identity, built on the QED mark, that motivated the rename); CHANGELOG.md (the retained 0.1.0/0.1.1 entries, which keep the old name verbatim); ADR-0026 (independent versioning of the two artifacts — this rename’s 0.2.0 alignment is coincidental); ADR-0030 (the docs site, whose domain moved from honest-scholar.science to defendable.science).