Understand application evidence

Application evidence is an immutable observation that the exact accepted artifact was applied through a supported path. It binds the artifact checksum, gate and evidence versions, actor authority, application stage, and observed result.

For the official sandbox, Payne verifies the stored artifact bytes and expected baseline, applies the bounded change, runs the fixture, updates the declared DataHub lineage, and performs a fresh read. A reviewed patch, an approval record, a successful process exit, or a mutation response alone does not prove the current graph changed.

Outside the supported official path, Payne does not claim application. It also does not merge repository changes, deploy production code, or delete a dataset.