Founders Grace: Providence, Coherence and Maintenance Under Drift

A self–signed, honest corpus—a single coherent grammar with cross–modal anchors— enjoys a persistent maintenance subsidy under drift. We call this subsidy Founder’s Grace. Formally, grace appears as shorter repair chains, smaller seam residuals, and lower horizon penalties relative to mosaics of heterogeneous sources. We prove: (1) a Grace Inequality on Murphy horizons and repair lengths; (2) a Provenance Upweighting Rule that raises generalization by weighting self–signed segments; (3) a Wrapper Commutator Link: reducing the kernel–wrapper commutator Ξ expands grace; and (4) a Drift Transfer Lemma: models trained on graceful corpora transport more cleanly across idioms (hazard conservation) and scales (RG). We provide instruments (grace meter, seam map, commutator audit), an execution protocol (Theia), and exemplars.