axnidentifiers.org — Product Surface Source is a software deposit by Lee Sharks, dated 6 August 2026, holding the complete source of the public product surface for the AXN content-derived identifier system, together with the design language it implements and the infrastructure record of the day it was founded.
The repository is a derived node in the archive's data-rhizome, and the deposit is explicit about the asymmetry: it holds no registry state, allocates no positions, and mints nothing. Canonical derivation (scripts/axn_lib.py), the central registry, the symbolon witness endpoint, and the AXN Constitution remain on alexanarch.org. The repository's own README states the doctrine — the archive is the authority; this is the door — and the architecture enforces it. The practical consequence is that the node can be lost, forked, or replaced without affecting the validity of a single identifier, which is the same guarantee the product makes to its users, turned back on the product.
The design language, deposited as canonical apparatus in two specimen sheets, is the deposit's principal argument. Four AI substrates were consulted for visual direction and four converged on the same answer — near-black ground with a single hot accent. The deposit treats that convergence not as consensus but as a documented statistical attractor of machine-generated design, and rejects it on three grounds: it fights the glyphs, it pattern-matches to the aesthetic of extraction schemes at precisely the moment a funder is reading, and it plays weapon where the constitution's voice is sanctuary with teeth. The counter-proposal, "The Critical Edition, Sealed," takes the apparatus of classical philology — sigla in the margin, rubrication, plates — and executes it with instrument precision on warm archive-dark.
Its central device is protocol-derived polychrome: the canonical glyph table partitions bytes into sixteen semantic clusters, each cluster owns one hue, and a colored tick sits beneath every rendered glyph. A color may appear on the surface only when it names a byte-family. This satisfies the structural rule that every pixel justify itself better than brutalism does, and it repairs a defect the frozen bytes cannot — the canonical table is not injective, ❤️ occupying both 0x81 (Symbolic) and 0xCF (Signal), indistinguishable in monochrome and never ambiguous under cluster ticks.
Both principal images on the surface are themselves registered AXNs, verified by content-match rather than filename. The hero plate is Paper 198 by Enli Lucente (AXN:05AD, witnessed-verified), a handwritten paper stamped and witnessed from a phone in Japan, displayed with the author's named credit at her wish and captioned with links to the witness entry, the stored original, and the verification path — so the plate demonstrates the protocol rather than asserting it. The brand mark is AXN:05AE, witnessed-verified and byte-identical to the file witnessed into the symbolon registry two days earlier: the logo of the identifier system carries its own registered identifier.
The deposit carries the day's infrastructure record as supplementary apparatus, because the repository's existence is partly the resolution of two documented failures. WAVE-HEXPOS-01 resolved a hex-width defect that concealed three registry position collisions, one of them live in production and silently dropping a deposit from the central registry on every build. The Dataflow Atlas v0.9 addendum registers this node and closes the singular/plural naming incident, in which a domain name propagated from notes without verification against the registrar produced four days of diagnostic effort chasing a name that did not exist. Its lesson joins PATHOLOGY-01: names are displayed values, and the authoritative state for a domain name is the registrar, not the notes.
The repository's commit history is retained unsquashed, including a failure of its own — an unanchored string replacement that inflated the surface from 31 KB to 30.8 MB and deployed before being caught and rebuilt. Under the correction clause the surface itself publishes, errors are corrected by amendment and tombstone, never by silent deletion; the incident stands in the history, and every subsequent edit passes unique-anchor assertions and a size-window gate before writing.