The one seam, shown: Inline up close

In post 10 I closed the composition-versus-coherence question with one paragraph: I kept strict object-scoping, reserved an Inline operator for later, and rejected automatic reach-down. That was true, and it was too fast. A reader told me the reserved operator was not clear from a sentence, which is fair. A design record that asserts a decision without showing it is not really a record. So here is the seam, worked out. First, the good news that made this only one seam and not ten: composition and coherence mostly do not collide. Composition substitutes complex types ; coherence binds scalar facets ; those are disjoint kinds of member. A collection gives one persona per element. Draw order falls out of the eager construction rule from post 7. And the resolver pipeline I pre-paid for back in post 4 turned out to be coherence's host. The two threads layer cleanly almost everywhere. Almost. The discontinuity Coherence is object-scoped (post 5). That one rule has a consequence that only shows up once you have composition encouraging you to split a type across nested objects: moving a facet into a child changes whether it coheres. // Flat: Email is a Person facet, so it coheres with the name. Customer { FirstName , LastName , Email } // -> "Maria", "Gonzalez", "maria.gonzalez@..." // Decomposed: Contact is its own scope. A lone Email there does not activate a // persona (one corroborating member, no name anchor), so it is a plain, unrelated email. Customer { FirstName , LastName , Contact : ContactInfo { Email } } // -> "Maria", "Gonzalez", "rwilson@..." Same three fields, same intent, different result, decided entirely by which object they live on. That is the discontinuity. The options A, strict: object-scoping stays. The decomposed email does not cohere. Maximally predictable. The gap is the already-deferred cross-entity work. B, reach-down: a child with no entity of its own is absorbed into the parent scope. The email coheres. But "absorbed or not" now depends on hidd