Room 04 · Refinery
The reliability contracts make autonomy safe.
Leases, fencing tokens, immutable attempts, and fail-closed states — the invariants that let the factory crash anywhere and recover by reconciliation.
The invariants underneath
Every autonomous system eventually crashes mid-operation. The factory is designed so that this is boring: durable state is the only truth, every effect is declared before it is attempted, and recovery is reconciliation rather than heroics.
The contracts in brief: one writer per lane, enforced by leases and fencing tokens. Terminal states never reopen — a retry is a new attempt. Anything ambiguous fails closed and waits for the deterministic operator inbox rather than guessing.
Evidence traces — the live record showing these contracts holding in production — will fold into this station.
A full station guide arrives with the new edition of the book.