State Machine — history

The dated record of how State Machine got here, moved out of the spec on 2026-10-20 because a reader does not need it to use the spec today. The spec keeps every section spec-format.md requires and its Deleted: tombstones; everything smaller is in git log -- atoms/state-machine.md.

Decisions

Entries that record a migration or a repair rather than a turn the pattern took.

• 2026-09-12 — Rewritten in GRACE lang v0.40; nothing but language changed. Chose: the five actions as a signature block, Invariant 1 through 10 keeping their numbers, the declaration’s ten well-formedness checks raised to a Declaration 1 through 17 family of their own, every success effect conditioned on a declared admitted instantiate, admitted fire or admitted history (Hard invariant 16), [Fire]’s seven-step rejection precedence kept beside the rules as an eight-row case space with the ordering carried by ONLY IF guards rather than by a prose rejection priority line repeated in two sections, the six acceptance areas opened into Check 1.1 through 8.2 with three External checks for what the store cannot answer, the Non-goals-and-edge-cases prose split into a Non-goal 1 through 21 family and four edge-case families (String, Clock semantics, Concurrency, Atomic writes), the Composition notes prose raised to Composition note 1 through 10. Over: the prose spec. Because: the migration plan; cites.py --into state-machine found nothing in the corpus citing this atom by label. 78.8 KB → 67.0 KB.

• 2026-09-12 — The within-workflow temporal bound is a precedence, not a ≥. Chose: Operation 20 — IF the resolved firing instant precedes the workflow’s instantiation instant THEN [Fire] MUST answer invalid-request. Over: IF fired_at EXCEEDS instantiated_at OR fired_at = instantiated_at, the two-arm spelling the condition operator set forces on a ≥. Because: that spelling is a watched class at five sites across two specs (council read 29), and this atom would have been the third. A bound that admits its own boundary is a precedes prohibition in one arm — the boundary case (a transition firing at the instant of instantiation) is legal, and one arm says so. The class may still earn an operator; it does not need this atom’s vote.

• 2026-09-12 — Four propositions had two owners each. Chose: Invariant 2 owns exactly-one-current-state and the State family no longer restates it; Operation 21 owns one entry per admitted fire and Invariant 5 no longer does; State 4 owns the history entry’s field set and Invariant 9 no longer does; Invariant 8.2 owns the atom does not evaluate a guard and the Non-goal family no longer does. Over: keeping each pair for emphasis. Because: Authority 3. All four were found by W-duplicate-proposition, which is the check earning its keep on the largest atom migrated so far — 192 rules, where a reader cannot hold the whole surface at once and a duplicate is invisible by construction.

Migration notes

• 2026-09-15 — Capability requirement 1, moved from Operation. What the deployment supplies, which is what the family means. The rule stood under Operation — one action’s rules — while naming no action, because this spec was migrated before the standard family had a home in an atom; the five atoms migrated a day later put the same obligation here. The words are the words the rule carried (council read 76).