Infrastructure · Primitives
Trace
Record the lineage or provenance of a target
Definition
Mechanism
A primitive for Provenance and Lineage. Attaches a chronological history log to a target entity. Each recorded modification appends a new immutable record to its trace, enabling auditability, debugging, and causal reasoning. Coverage may be partial: a trace guarantees the ordering and immutability of the records it holds, not that every modification reached it.
Invariants
- Causality: Events must be logged in monotonic order.
- Immutability: History cannot be rewritten, only appended to.
Risks
Failure modes
Unattributable record
an entry cannot be tied to whoever produced it.
Unbounded growth
an append-only log only grows. Expiry would contradict Immutability, so truncation or archival is a separate concern.
Silent gap
a modification occurs without a record, so the absence of an entry is not evidence that nothing happened.
Relationships
Root pattern: builds on nothing in this library.
Used by
References
Mind
Autonomous Goal-Directed Entity
Immutable append-only log of agent actions for compliance and debugging
Society
Explicit safety reasoning prior to execution
Mind
Automated scientific method
Society
Emergent working groups from activity density
Mind
Self-location awareness within the task graph
Mind
Reinforce constraints in system prompt before each response
Mind
Constraint-based novelty enforcement
Mind
Pre-execution mental model
Durable persistence of volatile state
Society
Indirect coordination via environment modification (Ant Colony)
Mind
Belief Provenance (Macro for Trace(Belief))
Reference