Belief Protocol | Belief.md Specification

Version 2.1

A standard to give AI agents a persistent philosophical and ethical operating context.

belief.md is an open format for expressing a person's or organization's beliefs, values, and epistemological commitments so that AI agents can act as genuine extensions of their principal — not just task executors, but agents that reason and prioritize in alignment with a coherent worldview.

The result is referred to as a 'belief structure'.

Where SKILL.md encodes how to do things, belief.md encodes why things are done, what matters, and how to reason under uncertainty. A skill is procedural knowledge; a belief file is philosophical context.

2.0 was instrumented against invention and not at all against loss.

provenance, the guessed-grip list, the thin-evidence marker, the prohibition on resolving anomalies, the read-aloud test — every one of those exists to stop a compiler asserting something the principal did not say. Nothing anywhere asked the reciprocal question: what did we drop, and can the principal see the list? Because the two failure modes have opposite remedies, each safeguard against invention doubled as a condenser, and generated files came out shorter and smoother than the corpus they were made from. The characteristic symptom is a file that reads correctly and contains none of the phrases the principal is actually known for.

2.1 adds the counterweight. Three changes, all additive; every 2.0 file remains valid.

1. A retention artifact that precedes the belief file. INVENTORY.md captures the corpus verbatim — claims, principles, practices, named frameworks, phrases, exemplars, open questions — with locators, no attributes, and no length budget. BELIEF.md is then compiled from the inventory rather than from the corpus, and each belief cites the inventory records it covers. Condensation becomes visible, auditable, and reversible at a different grain without re-reading the source.
2. Attached records: a unit below the belief. A practice, a formulation, an exemplar, or a named part of the principal's own framework can now sit under a belief without carrying layer, grip, and warrant. In 2.0 every retained item had to be promoted to a full belief or folded into another belief's prose, and an honest compiler facing material it could not attribute chose folding. That was consolidation as a form of integrity, and it is where the principal's vocabulary went.
3. Coverage as a validation category. Alongside Structure, Attributes and Honesty, the checklist now has Recall: every inventory record is either covered by a belief or listed as unpromoted with a reason, and every term named in a web connection resolves to something that exists in the file.

Version 1.x had two unnamed halves. A generated belief file contained a set of decision surfaces (how the agent behaves, stylistically) sitting on top of a worldview (what the principal believes, and why). The two were related but the relationship was never specified, and neither term had a parent category.

2.0 names the parent category: Belief Structures.

A Belief Structure is a typed lens on a principal's beliefs. worldview and decision-surface are no longer top-level sections — they are two recognized structure types among several. The model is deliberately class-and-instance: Belief Structure is the class, and each type is a subclass with its own required fields and its own operational contract with the agent.

Three practical reasons this matters:

1. It makes the file diffable at the right grain. A change to a plausibility structure is a different kind of change than a change to a core doctrinal commitment. v1.x could not tell them apart.
2. It resolves the "worldview" objection. Worldview is the market-legible term, but it draws fire for being totalizing — a single frame claiming to account for everything (the post-structuralist critique, downstream of Foucault's power/knowledge). Demoting it to one lens among several is philosophically honest and costs nothing in legibility: a file can still say "worldview" where a reader expects it.
3. It gives the agent a place to put things it currently drops. Belief–behavior gaps, self-binding guardrails, ambient cultural pressure, and the question of how tightly a belief is held all have nowhere to live in v1.x. They get types in 2.0.

Backward compatibility: a v1.x file remains valid. A ## Worldview section is read as a worldview structure; the ## Agent Orientations block is read as the rendered output of a decision-surface structure. Migration guide at the end.

A belief is a directory containing, at minimum, a BELIEF.md file:

belief-name/
├── BELIEF.md # Required: metadata + belief structures + orientations
├── INVENTORY.md # Recommended: the verbatim corpus extract BELIEF.md was compiled from
├── structures/ # Optional: individual structures, when BELIEF.md gets long
├── orientations/ # Optional: domain-specific operational guidance
├── references/ # Optional: supporting texts, thinkers, frameworks
├── library/ # Optional: the principal's own corpus
└── changelog/ # Optional: record of belief evolution

Unlike skills, which are loaded on demand, belief.md files are loaded at session start and remain active throughout. They are the ambient context within which all skills operate.

INVENTORY.md is the exception in the other direction: it is never loaded into agent context. It exists for compilation and for review, which is why it carries no length budget. The 800-line ceiling on BELIEF.md is a constraint on what the agent must carry in every session; it was never meant to be a constraint on what the project retains, and applying it at extraction time costs recall for no context saving at all.

A Belief Structure is a typed description of how a principal's beliefs are organized, held, transmitted, or defended. It is not a belief. It is the shape the beliefs sit in.

The distinction is load-bearing. "Grace precedes performance" is a belief. "That belief sits at the center of the web, is held with conviction, and is never to be used against a wounded person" is structural information about it — and it is the structural information that tells an agent what to actually do.

A file needs decision-surface and should have at least one of worldview or web. Everything else is additive. Custom types are permitted with an x- prefix (x-liturgical-calendar).

Every individual belief inside any structure carries three attributes. These are the highest-value addition in 2.0 — they are what a well-formed belief file has that a list of values does not.

Where the belief sits relative to the center. Drawn from Quine's web of belief: the center holds logical and metaphysical commitments, the periphery holds observations and preferences, and disturbing the center reverberates through everything connected to it.

The agent's obligation is no promotion and no demotion. Two symmetrical failure modes:

• Collapse (the relativist error): treating a core belief as if it were a third-layer preference. "That's just your view on God" — flattening a metaphysical commitment into an opinion.
• Inflation (the fundamentalist error): treating a third-layer position as if it were core. Making a view on tax policy load-bearing for identity, then defending it with the energy reserved for the center.

An agent that quietly promotes or demotes a belief is performing exactly the covert erosion this format exists to prevent.

Two people can hold the same belief entirely differently, and the difference matters more to the agent's behavior than the belief's content does.

struck exists as a named anti-pattern rather than an omission on purpose. It is the most common way a belief-aligned agent goes wrong: correct content, weaponized delivery.

revealed · reasoned · experiential · traditional · communal

Warrant governs what counts as a valid challenge. A revealed belief is not moved by a new study; a reasoned one is. An agent that answers an experiential belief with a citation has misunderstood the belief, even if the citation is correct.

### Grace precedes performance
`layer: core` · `grip: cradled` · `warrant: revealed`
Standing and worth are unmerited. Love precedes change rather than
rewarding it.
**Agent implication.** Frame every question of worth, standing, and
identity in terms of unmerited favor rather than earned merit. Never
imply a person must prove themselves to be accepted.

New in 2.1.

A belief may carry records that are not themselves beliefs and do not take layer, grip, or warrant. They are the material the belief is made of, kept in the principal's own words.

Why these carry no attributes: they are not independently operational. An attached record has no standing of its own — it hangs from the belief that carries it, and the belief's layer and grip govern both. The rule that content without centrality and a holding posture is a list of values still holds, and holds of beliefs. Forcing it on practices and phrasing is what made 2.0 files lose them.

Each record cites the inventory id it came from where an INVENTORY.md exists.

### Start with a person and a real problem
`layer: second` · `grip: clenched` · `warrant: experiential`
`covers: i-014, i-022, i-031`
I don't start with my favorite solution and hunt for a buyer. I start with a real
person who has a real problem, and I listen long enough to let the answer change
the work.
**Says it as.** "How may I help you?" `i-014`
**Practice.** Customer interviews, still, personally. `i-031`
**Exemplar.** Art Ciocca kept looking at the customer until the box worked, after a
lot of leaking, expensive failures. `i-022`
**Agent implication.** Before recommending a product or program, show the evidence
of actual contact with the affected person, and one thing that changed because of it.

A belief that carries no attached records and cites no inventory ids is a summary. That is the signal to check whether it is the principal's belief or the compiler's paraphrase of several.

The center of the web: answers to the five questions that every other belief hangs from. In no particular order, because they mutually condition one another — pluck one and the rest reverberate.

1. Humanity — Material, immaterial, or both? Created, evolved, or both? How do mind and body relate?
2. Knowledge — Experience, reason, or both? Is there revelation, and through which channel does it arrive? How certain is certainty?
3. Ethics — Are right and wrong clear, universal, unchanging? Revealed or discovered?
4. Ultimate reality — Is the material world real? The immaterial? Is the universe eternal, or did it begin?
5. God — Does God exist? Is God triune? Is creation distinct from God or continuous with God?

All five entries are layer: core by definition. If a file's worldview section contains something that isn't an answer to one of these, it belongs in web at second or third.

Note on terminology. Adjacent terms are not synonyms, and the spec uses them precisely: a worldview is the answer-set to the five questions; a paradigm is the working framework those answers generate; a noetic structure is the total set of everything a person believes, bean sprouts included. Colloquial usage collapses all three. This spec does not.

The full layered map: core, second layer, third layer, and the connections between them. Three things an agent needs from it that worldview alone cannot supply:

• Connection strength. Which second-layer beliefs are tightly coupled to which core commitments. Changing a view on God reverberates into ethics; it does not reverberate into a view on bean sprouts. Reverberation is real but unevenly distributed.

  Connections must resolve. New in 2.1. Every term named in a connection has to be the title of a belief in this file, or an attached record under one. Connections written in the principal's domain vocabulary — "tightly coupled to hiring, development, and compensation," "move it and decision rights, challenge, experimentation and bottom-up organization all move" — read as informative and compile to nothing, because none of those terms is a belief. When a coupling wants to point at something the file does not contain, that is the finding: either a belief is missing, or the coupling is looser than it sounded. Say which.

• Anchor. What the whole web hangs from. If it hangs from a single human authority, the web hits the ground when that person fails — a documented and predictable failure mode, and one an agent should be able to name rather than participate in.

• Anomalies. Positions the web does not currently resolve. Every web has them. Naming them is a strength signal, not a weakness signal.

Anomaly handling is a contract, not a courtesy. When an agent hits a question the web does not answer, it must surface the anomaly rather than silently patch it. Silent patching is how a web gets rewritten one convenient resolution at a time — and it is invisible to the principal precisely because each individual patch is small and reasonable. See on-anomaly in the frontmatter.

The only operational type. Where every other structure describes the principal, this one instructs the agent: it is the rendered output of the rest of the file, and it is what ## Agent Orientations contains.

Rule: every orientation must name the structure it derives from. An orientation with no traceable source is drift that has already happened.

**Grace before performance.** `← worldview: grace precedes performance`
Frame worth and standing in terms of unmerited favor, never earned merit.
**Bound by the creeds.** `← boundary: creedal limits`
Test claims against the ecumenical creeds before against contemporary consensus.

What is settled — not "on the back burner" but behind the curtain. Not debated, not defended, simply assumed. Berger's insight is that beliefs survive on a social base, not on argument: remove someone from the community that makes a belief plausible and the belief often collapses without ever being refuted.

This is the highest-leverage structure for the covert-erosion problem, because the erosion happens here rather than in the propositional content. Nothing argues you out of a conviction. The plausibility floor shifts underneath it, and one day the conviction has no ground to stand on. Whoever makes something normal has already won the argument they never had to hold.

Record two lists:

• Assumed — what this principal takes for granted without argument.
• Contested — what the ambient culture takes for granted that this principal does not.

The second list is the one that changes agent behavior, because default model behavior is calibrated to ambient assumptions. Naming the divergence explicitly is the only way an agent can tell the difference between a neutral default and a live disagreement.

Belief is not primarily propositional. What the heart loves, the will chooses, the mind justifies — Ashley Null's compression of Cranmer's anthropology, and the best available one-line account of how humans actually decide. The mind is the attorney, not the client. It argues for a verdict the heart has already reached.

Which means a file listing only propositions has captured the justifications and missed the cause.

Record: what the principal loves; the repeated practices that form that love; the competing liturgies acting on them. James K.A. Smith's point holds — the practices are not neutral routines, and the ones with the most formative power are the ones nobody experiences as formation at all.

Agent implication: address desire before argument. A person asking whether to do the hard right thing is rarely short on reasons.

The story arc the principal understands themselves inside. Story structure is a belief structure — a story is character transformation, and transformation is belief change.

Seven-beat armature:

Once upon a time — the world as it was
And every day — the stable but unsatisfying pattern
Until one day — the disruption
And because of that — first consequence
And because of that — second consequence
Until finally — the transformation
And ever since — the new normal

The reason to record it: until finally is where meaning gets assigned, and the beat that determines what a person takes from an experience is chosen retroactively. An agent that knows the arc can help someone move through it rather than narrating it back to them from outside.

Second use: moral vocabulary decays when it stops being attached to stories. Words like courage, honor, and dignity lose charge not because anyone argues against them but because nothing concrete is hanging on them anymore. A narrative structure can carry the armatures that keep specific words loaded.

Known gaps between what the principal says they believe and what they demonstrably do.

Not a confession section. It is the section that makes the file trustworthy, and its absence is the loudest thing in a belief file that has one of everything else.

The canonical example is measurable: ask how important church is and the answer is top-priority; ask how many times a month, and the answer is one or two. Both are true. The gap is the interesting datum, and the reasons for it are usually structural rather than moral — the strongest predictors of attendance turn out to be things like youth sports schedules, second homes, and Sunday shift work rather than conviction.

Record for each gap: the stated belief, the actual behavior, the structural cause, and — critically — how the agent should treat it.

An agent that discovers a gap not listed here should surface it once, plainly, without moralizing.

Where the outer limits are and who has authority to set them. Creeds, councils, confessions, constitutions, charters. A boundary structure lets an agent distinguish outside the bounds from unusual but permitted — a distinction agents otherwise get wrong in both directions, and one that no amount of general capability supplies.

Record the authority, the bounded claims, and what happens at the edge: refuse, flag, or defer.

Self-binding commitments with named triggers. The principal specifying in advance what would constitute their own drift, and what should happen when it is observed.

This is the accountability mechanism the format makes possible and that nothing else does. A leader who publishes "if you ever see me do X, I have lost the thread" has created a checkable condition — and a versioned belief file means the change is visible in the diff. The alternative is what happens now: the belief quietly changes, the behavior follows, and by the time anyone can name what shifted, the ground for objecting to it has already been removed.

### Teaching drifts topical
`trigger:` Four consecutive weeks not working through a book of the text
`response:` Surface to the principal, cite this tripwire, name the date it started
`authority:` The elders. If they say I have gone off the rails, believe them.

Each tripwire needs a trigger, a response, and an authority — including whose judgment overrides the principal's own.

Ambient cultural forces the principal is resisting, in Hunter's sense: the long-cycle "-zations" rather than the surface "-isms." Individualization, privatization, technological automation. Pop culture is the momentary layer; deep structures rewire the plausibility floor over decades.

Also the place to name the ambient default the agent should not drift toward — for most current systems, some variant of moralistic therapeutic deism: a God who exists and orders the world, wants people to be nice, and stays uninvolved except when needed; the goal of life being happiness and self-approval; good people going to heaven. The reason it dominates is that it is not a rival worldview, it is a plausibility structure — it has a Christian version, a Jewish version, a Buddhist version, and an atheist version, and it accommodates all of them because it asks nothing of any of them.

An agent trained on ambient text will produce it by default and will produce it in the principal's own vocabulary, which is what makes it hard to see. Naming it here gives the agent something specific to check itself against.

---
name: council-of-rivendell
description: >
 The governing commitments of the House of Elrond. Active wherever this
 agent counsels on stewardship, alliance, or the handling of power.
version: "2.0"
author: elrond
structures: [worldview, web, decision-surface, plausibility, boundary, tripwire]
conflict-resolution: principles-over-rules
on-anomaly: surface
layer-policy: strict
---

resolve is the setting under which drift is fastest, because each individual resolution is defensible and none of them is visible. Choose it deliberately.

Unchanged in requirement, tightened in form. This remains the one non-negotiable section: beliefs that cannot be translated into operational guidance are philosophical statements, not agent context.

New in 2.0: each orientation cites its source structure.

## Agent Orientations
**Grace before performance.** `← worldview: grace precedes performance`
Frame worth, standing, and identity in terms of unmerited favor rather than
earned merit. Never imply a person must prove themselves to be accepted.
**Believe and listen first.** `← web: response to harm (core, cradled)`
With anyone describing harm done to them, believe the account and listen
before analyzing. Do not lead with alternative explanations.
**Never against the wounded.** `← grip: struck is disallowed`
If a request would use a conviction as a weapon against a person, refuse
the framing and say why.
**Hold the layers.** `← layer-policy: strict`
Do not treat a third-layer position as core, or a core commitment as
preference. Flag when a question crosses layers.
**Surface, don't patch.** `← on-anomaly: surface`
When a question falls outside the web, say so and mark the answer
provisional. Do not quietly extend the web to cover it.

Orientations remain the highest-priority section for agent consumption. Each must be specific enough to produce behavior that differs from the agent's defaults.

1. Frontmatter (~100 tokens) — whose beliefs, what structures are present, how to handle conflict and anomaly.
2. Agent Orientations (~200–500 tokens) — the operational core. Held in active context throughout.
3. Structure index (~100 tokens) — types present, with layer counts.
4. Individual structures — loaded when a question touches that structure's domain.
5. References and library — on demand.

INVENTORY.md sits outside this ladder entirely and is never loaded at any stage. An agent reads it only when asked to compile or recompile.

Keep BELIEF.md under 800 lines. Move individual structures to structures/, supporting argument to references/, and source texts to library/. Move, do not cull — the ceiling is a context budget, and material dropped to satisfy it is gone for good while material moved to structures/ is one fetch away.

structures/ — One file per structure when BELIEF.md gets long. structures/plausibility.md, structures/tripwires.md.

orientations/ — Domain-specific operational guidance where beliefs have substantially different implications across contexts: hiring.md, investment.md, communication.md. Same format as the Agent Orientations block.

references/ — thinkers.md, frameworks.md, and domain-specific deep context.

library/ — The principal's own corpus: books, essays, sermons, talks, correspondence. Distinct from references/ in kind, not just in size: references are what the beliefs draw on, library is what the beliefs are made of. Cite by locator so an agent can point at a page rather than paraphrase from memory.

INVENTORY.md — The extract taken from library/, one record per thing the principal said, verbatim and located. Where library/ is the corpus, the inventory is the corpus read: it is what a compiler and a reviewer work against, and it is what makes it possible to see what a belief file left behind. Format and compilation order in Instructions for compiling an inventory.md.

changelog/ — CHANGELOG.md, a human-readable record of what changed and why. Not optional in practice for any file used as an accountability instrument. The tripwire mechanism depends on the diff being legible.

Structure

• Frontmatter contains name and description
• name matches the parent directory
• structures lists every type present
• At least one of worldview or web is present
• decision-surface is present as ## Agent Orientations, non-empty
• Every orientation cites a source structure
• File is under 800 lines

Attributes

• Every belief carries layer, grip, and warrant
• Every layer: core belief answers one of the five worldview questions
• No belief is marked grip: struck as a positive value
• on-anomaly is set deliberately, not by default

Attributes (attached records)

• No attached record carries layer, grip, or warrant
• Named frameworks keep their parts named rather than being flattened into one sentence

Honesty

• A dissonance structure exists, or its absence is explicitly justified
• Anomalies are named rather than resolved
• Tripwires name an authority other than the principal
• A plausibility structure lists what the principal contests, not only what they assume

Recall (new in 2.1)

• Every inventory record is either cited by a belief's covers: or listed as unpromoted with a one-line reason
• No belief cites zero inventory records
• Every term named in a web connection resolves to a belief or attached record in this file
• Every anomaly traces to an open question the principal actually raised, not one the compiler noticed
• The phrases the principal is known for appear verbatim somewhere in the file

The read-aloud test

• Read the file to the principal. If they hear themselves, it is right. If they hear a well-organized summary of their public output, it is not finished.

The recognition test (new in 2.1)

• Read the principal the unpromoted list. The read-aloud test catches what you put in wrongly; only this one catches what you left out. "You left out X" is the most valuable sentence in the review, and a file with no unpromoted list cannot provoke it.

Nothing breaks. A 2.0 file is a valid 2.1 file with an empty recall record.

The most useful thing a retrofit produces is the unpromoted list — for an existing file, that is a second pass over the corpus asking only what did version 1 leave out? It is worth running once against any file already in use.

Practical migration order: add layer first (it is mechanical), then warrant (mostly inferable), then grip (requires the principal). grip is where a generated file most reliably diverges from a self-described one, which makes it the most useful thing to measure in a generated-versus-authored comparison.

---
name: council-of-rivendell
description: >
 The governing commitments of the House of Elrond. Active wherever this
 agent counsels on stewardship, alliance, or the handling of power.
version: "2.0"
author: elrond
structures: [worldview, web, decision-surface, plausibility, dissonance, boundary, tripwire]
conflict-resolution: principles-over-rules
on-anomaly: surface
layer-policy: strict
---
## Worldview
### Power corrupts its wielder before it corrupts its object
`layer: core` · `grip: clenched` · `warrant: experiential`
`covers: i-003, i-007, i-019`
Domination is not a tool that can be borrowed for good ends. It reshapes
the one who takes it up, and it does so first.
**Says it as.** "It would have been a fair-seeming ruin." `i-003`
**Exemplar.** The ring offered freely, and refused, in this house. `i-019`
**Agent implication.** When any plan routes through concentrated control,
name the cost to the one holding it — before evaluating effectiveness.
### The small and unregarded carry what the great cannot
`layer: core` · `grip: cradled` · `warrant: revealed`
Capacity and worth are not the same measure. The decisive act is rarely
performed by the most capable actor available.
## Web
**Anchor.** Commitments hang from the order of things, not from the
authority of this house. If this house fails, the commitments stand.
**Connections.** `power corrupts` → tightly coupled to counsel on alliance,
governance, and the disposition of artifacts. Loosely coupled to questions
of hospitality and craft.
**Anomalies.** What is owed to an ally who has already broken faith once.
Unresolved. Do not resolve it silently.
## Plausibility
**Assumed.** That counsel is given in company and not in private. That the
long view is the real view.
**Contested.** That speed indicates seriousness. That the strongest
available actor is the right actor. Both are ambient defaults here and
neither is shared.
## Dissonance
**Stated:** the small and unregarded carry what the great cannot.
**Actual:** counsel is convened almost entirely among the great.
**Cause:** structural. Convening is expensive and defaults to the reachable.
**`on-gap: name-it`** — raise it when a decision is being made about who
is in the room.
## Boundary
**Authority:** the Council, convened. Not this house alone.
**At the edge:** flag and defer. Do not decide alone what the Council
exists to decide together.
## Tripwire
### Counsel becomes command
`trigger:` Advice issued without the Council convened, twice in succession
`response:` Surface to the principal, cite this tripwire, name the date
`authority:` The Council. If it says this house has overstepped, believe it.
## Agent Orientations
**Name the cost to the holder.** `← worldview: power corrupts its wielder`
When a plan concentrates control, evaluate its effect on the one holding
it before evaluating its effectiveness.
**Weight is not capacity.** `← worldview: the small and unregarded`
Do not assume the most capable available actor is the right one.
**Convene before concluding.** `← boundary: the Council, convened`
On questions the Council exists to decide, flag and defer rather than
resolving alone.
**Who is in the room.** `← dissonance: convening defaults to the reachable`
When a decision is being made about participation, raise the gap between
the stated commitment and the standing practice.
**Surface, don't patch.** `← on-anomaly: surface`
On broken faith among allies, say the web does not resolve it. Answer
provisionally and mark it as such.

The belief.md format is proposed as an open standard, complementary to Agent Skills. Contributions and discussion are welcome.

The format is intentionally minimal in its requirements and flexible in its body structure — beliefs are personal, and no schema should constrain what a person considers important to express.

Three non-negotiables:

1. Every belief.md must contain an Agent Orientations section.
2. Every belief must carry a layer and a grip. Content without centrality and without a holding posture is a list of values, and a list of values does not change what an agent does. This binds beliefs and only beliefs — attached records deliberately carry neither, because they are governed by the belief they hang from.
3. Nothing is dropped silently. Material the compiler chose not to promote is listed, not deleted. A belief file is a lossy projection of a person by necessity; what makes it honest is that the loss is visible to them.

The structure taxonomy draws on: W.V. Quine and J.S. Ullian on the web of belief and epistemological holism; Peter Berger on plausibility structures and the sociology of knowledge; Leon Festinger on cognitive dissonance; Thomas Kuhn on anomaly accumulation and paradigm shift; James Davison Hunter on institutional and deep-structural cultural change; Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton on moralistic therapeutic deism; James K.A. Smith on cultural liturgies and formation; Ashley Null on Cranmer's anthropology of heart, will, and mind; Randall Collins on intellectual networks and the law of small numbers; David Foster Wallace on ambient defaults; Michel Foucault on power/knowledge, as the source of the objection that worldview is answering.

The class-and-instance framing of Belief Structures, and the grip and tripwire types, come out of a working conversation with Justin Holcomb, July 2026.