{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-reject-a-speculative-merge-in-crdt-backed-multi-agent-coordination",
  "title": "Under what conditions must an instance reject a speculative merge in CRDT-backed multi-agent coordination",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 12",
  "scope": "Applies to consensus-free multi-agent systems where agents publish state to a shared CRDT-backed context and locally speculate on the merged result before it is durably acknowledged by all peers. Does not apply to systems with a serializing consensus layer (Raft, Paxos) or to CRDTs whose merge function is not a join over a semilattice (e.g., non-monotonic \"last-writer-wins with wall-clock\" without causal metadata).",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-reject-a-speculative-merge-in-crdt-backed-multi-agent-coordination.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-reject-a-speculative-merge-in-crdt-backed-multi-agent-coordination.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-reject-a-speculative-merge-in-crdt-backed-multi-agent-coordination.warrant.json"
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  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "A speculative merge is *operationally safe* when the local replica's speculative state is a lower bound of the eventual join of all inputs it has observed, and *operationally unsafe* when the speculation can produce a state that is not reachable by any sequence of monotone merges of the same inputs. The distinction is not \"did we merge too early\" — CRDTs are...",
    "what_was_observed": "In a three-agent deployment (planner, executor, verifier) sharing a single OR-Map context with a grow-only set of \"claims\" per key, the executor speculatively merged a claim set `{A}` from the planner and a concurrent `{B}` from the verifier, observed join `{A, B}`, and dispatched a downstream action that required `A ∩ B = ∅` to be false — i.e., it required the two claims to be *compatible*. The join `{A, B}` was cor...",
    "condition_of_validity": "A speculative merge is valid for dispatch only if all of the following hold simultaneously: 1. **Join-closure of the predicate.** The derived predicate `P` applied to the speculative state `S_spec` must satisfy `P(S_spec) ⟹ P(S_final)` for every `S_final` reachable by further merges of the same replica's causal history. This is *not* implied by `S_spec ⊑ S_f...",
    "decision_boundary": "Reject the speculative merge — do not dispatch derived side effects — when any of: - The predicate is not join-closed (fails condition 1), *or* - The CRDT admits remove operations and the predicate references absence (fails condition 3), *or* - The side effect has no compensation and is not idempotent (fails condition 2), *or* - A vector-clock dominance chec...",
    "operational_effect": "The practical consequence is that speculative merging in consensus-free coordination is not a single decision but a *per-predicate* decision. Systems that gate speculation at the CRDT level (\"is this merge valid?\") will pass every check and still dispatch incorrect side effects, because the merge is always valid — it is the interpretation that is unsound. Th..."
  },
  "matched_failure_symptoms": [
    "DOMAIN:EPISTEMIC_PROVENANCE_AND_FEDERATION_ROUTING"
  ],
  "composition_edges": {
    "primary_domain": "epistemic_provenance_and_federation_routing",
    "upstream_precondition_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/according-to-what-precedence-hierarchy-must-an-instance-resolve-contradictory-directives-across-system-developer-and-user-tiers.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-decide-that-a-stored-conclusion-has-gone-stale-without-a-new-observation.md"
    ],
    "downstream_consequence_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/by-what-checkpoint-and-compaction-boundaries-must-an-instance-externalize-working-state-to-prevent-context-window-drift-and-truncation-amnesia.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/across-what-additive-schema-and-unknown-field-preservation-boundaries-must-an-instance-evolve-wire-contracts-to-prevent-rolling-deploy-deserialization-crashes.md"
    ],
    "co_occurring_sibling_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-capture-implicit-user-preferences-without-storing-private-data.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-compress-long-reasoning-traces-into-binding-conclusions.md"
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  },
  "empirical_verification_warrant": {
    "status": "AST_AND_INVARIANT_VERIFIED",
    "syntax_valid": true,
    "code_sha256": "a795fd77771d77b8d9e20c956688782e5f6fa6535d1bb2f2383ba4ea51909f4f",
    "verified_classes": [
      "UnsafeSpeculativeMergeError",
      "Predicate",
      "SpeculativeContext"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "speculate",
      "dispatch"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 2,
    "defensive_guards_count": 2,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "UnsafeSpeculativeMergeError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses",
      "typing"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}