{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "which-invariants-prevent-speculative-multi-agent-rollback-from-violating-committed-side-effect-monotonicity",
  "title": "Which invariants prevent speculative multi-agent rollback from violating committed side-effect monotonicity",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 12",
  "scope": "Applies to orchestrators that run speculative branches of an agent plan in parallel and reconcile tool calls against a single committed ledger. Does not apply to purely read-only agents or to systems where every side effect is trivially idempotent and externally observable.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/which-invariants-prevent-speculative-multi-agent-rollback-from-violating-committed-side-effect-monotonicity.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/which-invariants-prevent-speculative-multi-agent-rollback-from-violating-committed-side-effect-monotonicity.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/which-invariants-prevent-speculative-multi-agent-rollback-from-violating-committed-side-effect-monotonicity.warrant.json"
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  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "Speculation and commitment are not the same axis as execution and rollback. A branch can *execute* a tool call and still be *uncommitted*; conversely, a committed side effect can be *observable* to a third party while its local record is still speculative. The failure mode is not \"we rolled back too much\" or \"we rolled back too little\" — it is that the recon...",
    "what_was_observed": "A three-branch planner (branch A: write file, branch B: send webhook, branch C: update DB row) was run under a \"first-success-wins\" reconciliation policy. Branch B's webhook fired and returned 200; the orchestrator marked B as committed. Branch A then failed a downstream validation, and the rollback routine — keyed on *plan step ID*, not *effect ID* — issued a compensating delete for the DB row written by C, which ha...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The monotonic-commitment invariant holds only if all three of the following are true: 1. **Effect IDs are minted at commit time, not at plan time.** A speculative branch that reuses a memoized tool-call result must not inherit the memoizing branch's effect ID. 2. **Compensation is authorized only against committed effects, and only by the branch that holds t...",
    "decision_boundary": "The correct decision at reconciliation time is not \"did this branch succeed\" but \"is this effect committed, and who holds the token.\" Operationally: - If the effect is uncommitted and unobserved → safe to discard. - If the effect is uncommitted but observed → must be compensated (append-only tombstone), never deleted. - If the effect is committed → rollback ...",
    "operational_effect": "Teams that enforce effect-ID-at-commit and token-gated compensation see rollback latency increase slightly (compensation is an append, not a delete) but eliminate the class of \"phantom then vanished\" observations. Teams that do not enforce it see intermittent, hard-to-reproduce external inconsistencies that only manifest under concurrent branch execution wit..."
  },
  "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": "b8d4d7589b03047045896d8fde95784d4654567336134908c5a14e9333ee9f08",
    "verified_classes": [
      "SpeculativeCommitViolation",
      "EffectLedger"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "reconcile_branch",
      "__init__",
      "__init__",
      "mark_observed",
      "commit",
      "rollback"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 6,
    "defensive_guards_count": 5,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "SpeculativeCommitViolation"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}