diff --git a/research/witness-authoritative-networking/prior-art-2026-10-26.md b/research/witness-authoritative-networking/prior-art-2026-10-26.md
index dd547b38..77e0810e 100644
--- a/research/witness-authoritative-networking/prior-art-2026-10-26.md
+++ b/research/witness-authoritative-networking/prior-art-2026-10-26.md
@@ -294,3 +294,9 @@ The implemented path is a weighted plurality over self-asserted, unsigned claim
 - a determinism contract across runtimes
 
 Its demonstration case is a cheating client being caught and corrected by witnesses.
+
+## Product direction (operator, 2026-10-27, verbatim)
+
+"the value is in solving the multiplayer scaling problem for indie developers in an ergonomic fashion. Having one authoritative server is fine, up to a point, but there's no real open source playbook on how to ship an MMO, and existing solutions like SpacetimeDB have a huge ergonomics gap. I want CultMesh to feel like magic: as a garden path, you annotate your domain POCOs and simulation code and declare your authority structure (I see no reason why we couldn't support server-authoritative and trusted co-op as a configurable subset of the much harder problem we're aiming at, feel free to correct me if that's a silly notion), and it'll all just work without the developer needing to understand networking deeply."
+
+Witness authority is therefore one authority policy inside a garden-path framework, not the product. The ergonomics prior-art pass is `research/cultmesh-garden-path/`.