A stated degradation order — what is shed first, decided before the pressure

concept

The energy architecture names an explicit degradation order rather than letting a system discover its priorities under load, and the operating states are steward-enforced with a declared capability window. A system that has not decided what it sheds first will shed whatever fails first, which is rarely what it would have chosen. WHERE IT ALREADY BEARS WEIGHT — This project has the mechanism and not the statement: shards freeze and unfreeze, and the `core` shard can never be frozen — that IS a degradation order, but it is nowhere written as one. What gets served when memory, disk, or network is short should be a declared order a reader can check, not an emergent property of which code path happens to fail.