Canon Scope and Permissions
2 min read
A Canon document lives at one of two levels, and that choice decides how far its authority reaches.
Project Canon
Section titled “Project Canon”Created from a project’s Canon page. It grounds AI output in that project only.
Use project scope for:
- The product requirement document for this product
- Feature specs and design docs
- Acceptance and exit criteria for this project’s releases
- API contracts this product implements
This is the right default. Most documents describe one product.
Workspace Canon
Section titled “Workspace Canon”Created from the workspace Canon page. It grounds AI output in every project in the workspace.
Use workspace scope for:
- Company test strategy and QA conventions
- Accessibility, security or compliance standards
- Regulatory requirements every product must meet
- Terminology and naming conventions
How the Two Combine
Section titled “How the Two Combine”A generation run inside a project reads both levels. A tester asking about login behaviour wants the login spec and the company’s accessibility standard, so both are retrieved.
A run at the workspace level reads workspace documents only.
The Scope column on the project Canon table identifies each document as Project or Workspace, so it is always clear which page a document is managed from.
Permissions
Section titled “Permissions”Canon has four permissions, configured per role like every other area. See Roles overview.
| Permission | Allows |
|---|---|
| View | See Canon documents and open the sources cited by AI output |
| Create | Add documents to Canon |
| Update | Re-index a document after it changes or fails to parse |
| Delete | Remove a document from Canon and delete its index |
Why reading is open and writing is not
Section titled “Why reading is open and writing is not”Reading is open to every project role. A tester who cannot open a cited document cannot verify the AI output that cites it, which would make citations decorative.
Writing is restricted. Admitting a document changes what the AI asserts for everyone in scope — it is a change to shared authority, not a personal setting.
Workspace-level writes require workspace manager. Because workspace Canon grounds every project, its write actions sit at the highest level regardless of the role’s project permissions.
Deleting a Project
Section titled “Deleting a Project”Purging a project removes its Canon documents and their index along with everything else. Workspace Canon is unaffected.