Direction and execution

Four terms separate what a researcher directed from what an agent executed, without dividing intellectual credit by output.

Term	Meaning
Trace record	What a session keeps: a record of human direction and machine execution.
Direction	The human side: written instructions, choices, expressed preferences and objections.
Execution	The machine side, named by the execution marker, the Execution-agent: line of a commit.
Principal	The person an agent acts for. By default, the people whose prompts or comments direct a change own it and its account.

The distinction lets a collaborator examine a unit of work against the instructions that shaped it, rather than against the artifact alone.

An example

You ask for the yearly share of a table, and later object that the overall share was averaged wrongly. Both are your direction, kept in your own words. The agent’s run of the calculation is execution. You are the change’s principal. If a coauthor’s comment also shaped it, you both are.

Ownership is recorded per change. It does not change anyone’s Git identity. It also remains separate from the agent’s own choices, which the decision account records, and from any decision to accept the work. Input with no known speaker stays unattributed.

Why not “contribution”

An AI cannot make a contribution in the sense the word carries in research, and the human side is direction rather than donation. The word therefore keeps one sense only, the academic one: what a paper adds to a literature.