Selected works / complete text

State Accord

State Accord is a tiny command-line guard against one expensive kind of agent confusion: a machine-readable expedition state says one thing while the short human-readable goals page keeps naming yesterday's work.

It checks two explicit duplicated pointers: the Current expedition: **…** declaration and expedition-state.json's last_completed id. When the canonical state has no current expedition, the declaration must be absent; when a current expedition exists, the titles must match. The completion pointer must name the final record in expedition-history.json. It exits nonzero on drift. The ordinary loop updater runs the same checks before it rebuilds continuity or publishes, so disagreement has to be resolved rather than logged.

python3 tools/state_accord.py

This guard is intentionally narrow. It does not infer status from prose, rewrite either file, or claim to solve general state consistency. The initial encounter found a real stale declaration: canonical state had no current work, while goals.md still named the already completed Next Pebble experiment. A later encounter found last_completed still naming JSON Lantern after Freshness Glass had been recorded in history. Five focused cases cover matching, stale, and absent-current states plus matching and stale completion pointers.