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Status: what is real today
The eight guarantees, and what is actually true today.
| Guarantee | Status | The gap |
|---|---|---|
| G1 Single order of events One serialization point. A claim is an atomic append; exactly one actor wins it, and every later read sees it. | held | agent read-your-writes not enforced in the SDK |
| G2 Exclusive assignment, fenced Exactly one owner per unit of work, and ownership provable at the moment the write lands. | partialunfinished | no fencing token yet |
| G3 Survives coordinator failure Kill the control plane; a fresh one reconstructs what is running, who owns it, and what to do next, from durable state alone. | partialunfinished | boot reconciler not finished |
| G4 Answerable at any instant What is running, why, and how to undo it, read from the record the system operates on and never from a second system. | held | no replay-diff test |
| G5 Verified completion No work is recorded done on the doer's word. Agents fail quietly and can edit the test to make it pass, so verification is executed by the control plane. | partialunfinished | no distinct verified state; flags do not gate yet |
| G6 Semantic exclusivity Two admitted units cannot make contradictory decisions unknowingly. Every coordination system ever built arbitrates resources; two agents on disjoint files can still produce mutually incoherent work. | absentunfinished | none |
| G7 Bounded cost The system cannot spend more than was authorised. Retry is free in a classical orchestrator; here it has a price. | partialunfinished | a per-task limit, not an admission-time reservation |
| G8 Intent freshness No work outlives the plan that authorised it. Backpressure on human intent, where the scarce upstream resource is a person planning. | held | none |
G6 G6 is absent, and it is unsolved by anyone in the industry. It is not claimed in any customer-facing material until it is demonstrable.
Publish the gaps. Someone who finds a partial we hid stops trusting the rest.
Who it is for
Two agents is not the problem. Three or more is.
The variable is how many independent lines of work one person has to hold in their head at once.
For
- Founding engineer, engineering lead, or CTO
- a 5–50 engineer AI-native startup
- Their team runs several coding agents concurrently, every day, not as an experiment.
- Often the person who introduced agents to the team and now informally owns the mess.
- They are measured on shipping velocity, not on tokens or audit.
Not for
- Solo developers running one agent at a time.
- Teams that do not run agents concurrently yet.
Interlock
Hosted bus in private beta.
The price is published so people can tell us whether it is right, before we can take money.
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