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Worldlines

Why Worldlines Exist

The graph is the plan. worldline:live is the shared, stigmergic coordination surface that humans and agents react to by default.

A derived worldline is not a second-class draft or a Git branch with a new name. It is a candidate continuation of the plan: a pinned observation plus an overlay patch log stored in git-warp as a working set.

That matters because changing the live plan is not a private act. In XYPH, the shared graph is the environment everyone reacts to. If an agent lands a half-formed structural rewrite directly in worldline:live, other agents and humans may immediately re-route work, generate diagnostics against it, or respond to it as if it were settled truth.

Worldlines exist to preserve signal hygiene in that shared environment.

Default Rule

Use worldline:live for:

  • ordinary execution
  • truthful progress/status updates
  • routine evidence attachment
  • normal collaborative work

Use a derived worldline when the work is:

  • speculative
  • structurally disruptive
  • multi-step and only coherent as a set
  • high-blast-radius
  • explicitly counterfactual
  • intended for review before it becomes shared truth

Concrete Use Cases

1. Structural Replanning

An agent wants to split one quest into five quests, redistribute dependencies, and change ownership. That should not hit the live graph one mutation at a time, because the intermediate states would send misleading stigmergic signals.

printf '%s\n' \
  '{"v":1,"id":"fork-1","cmd":"fork_worldline","args":{"newWorldlineId":"worldline:plan-rewrite","scope":"campaign restructure"}}' \
  | node ./xyph.ts api

The agent can then use worldline:plan-rewrite for history, diff, apply, and observe(conflicts) without perturbing worldline:live.

2. High-Blast-Radius What-If Execution

A human or agent wants to know what happens if a submission lineage is rejected, tasks are reopened, and a dependency corridor is rewritten. That is not just a comment or proposal. It is an executable alternative graph state.

3. Multi-Step Speculative Execution

Some changes only make sense as a bundle:

  • create new nodes
  • retarget dependencies
  • change statuses
  • attach evidence
  • rewrite criteria

If those land incrementally in the live graph, the plan is briefly incoherent. A worldline gives that bundle a coherent execution surface.

4. Review Lanes

A reviewer can inspect a candidate future instead of a prose suggestion. That lets XYPH answer a stronger question than "what is proposed?":

What would the plan look like if this path were taken?

5. Offline Continuation

Because git-warp is offline-first, an agent can continue from a pinned observation while disconnected or asynchronous, record overlay patches in a working set, and settle those changes later without pretending they were always the shared truth.

6. Braided Execution

Some futures are not "pick one branch later." They are "keep one completed support line present while another line continues."

That operation is best described as a braid:

  • one worldline advances to produce an effect
  • that effect is kept co-present as a frozen support line
  • another worldline continues on top of the same shared base

Example: one line keeps a gate button depressed while another line advances through the newly opened path. This is not ordinary merge, and it is not Git rebase. It is a way of making two causally meaningful continuations visible at once.

Why Comments and Proposals Are Not Enough

Comments and proposals are good for discussion and recommendation. They are not enough for:

  • executable alternate state
  • coherent speculative multi-step mutation
  • local causal continuation from a past observation
  • time-travel workflows that continue instead of merely inspect

A proposal says what should happen. A worldline says here is the graph if this path is taken.

Control Plane Commands

Worldline operations are available through the xyph api control plane:

Command What it does
fork_worldline Create a derived worldline from live
braid_worldlines Keep multiple worldline effects co-present
compare_worldlines Factual divergence preview between worldlines
collapse_worldline Governed settlement from derived into live
attest Record governance attestations (gates for collapse)

Governed Settlement Flow

The canonical live collapse flow is:

  1. compare_worldlines persist:true — record a durable comparison artifact
  2. attest the returned comparison-artifact:* — governance gate
  3. collapse_worldline dryRun:false attestationIds:[...] — execute live settlement

Current Limitations

  • collapse_worldline currently settles into worldline:live only
  • rewind_worldline is reserved but not yet implemented
  • Compatibility projections (observe(slice.local), observe(context), etc.) are still catching up to full derived-worldline truth

Agent Usage

  • Stay on worldline:live for ordinary low-blast-radius work.
  • fork_worldline when you need a coherent speculative continuation or a review lane.
  • braid_worldlines when one continuation needs another's effects to stay co-present.
  • compare_worldlines before governance or settlement decisions.
  • collapse_worldline for governed settlement.
  • Hand off explicit worldlineId values. Do not pass substrate working-set IDs as public handles.

Terminology

The composition verb in XYPH's ontology is braid_worldlines. Terms like "rebase," "superpose," or "compose" may appear informally in discussion, but braid is the canonical name for keeping multiple worldline-derived effects in play at once.

For the broader technical framing, see XYPH As A WARP App.