Truth Machine / Kit

Atomic Transition

Apply an accepted change so that current truth, its record, and its ancestry advance together or not at all.

Tier: 3 · Normative weight: implements TM-CHG-003–TM-CHG-008 Requires: Change Packet, Typed Current Projection

Problem it removes

The change is applied, then the record is updated, then the index — usually. A crash, interruption, or forgotten step between them leaves current truth that cannot name its change, or a change record describing a state that never fully arrived.

Mechanism

In the Git-native shape, one commit carries the whole coherence boundary: the accepted change packet, the record it produces, and the updated current projection. Before that commit, application verifies the expected state still holds — the proposal’s expected_revision matches (TM-CHG-003) — and all invariants pass (TM-CHG-005), typically by running the governed read against the staged result. Stale work advances nothing (TM-CHG-006); a proposal whose expected state moved goes back to reconciliation, never gets rebased through. Invalid work advances nothing (TM-CHG-007). The commit itself is what makes truth and its change record durable as one recoverable operation (TM-CHG-004, TM-CHG-008).

A reader can verify atomicity after the fact: the commit that introduces a record also touches its change packet and the projection, and the commit’s parent is the proposal’s expected revision.

Cost

Authoring: a documented ritual, and optionally a check in the governed read that asserts past transitions were atomic. Per change: staging discipline — everything in one commit, verified before push. Per session: none.

Do not adopt when

There are no change packets to apply. For source code, Git commits are already atomic transitions; the pattern adds nothing there.

Evidence

Assessed in kinra-corpus, whose reader mechanically verifies that each record, its change, and the current selection moved in one commit; the reference instance’s frozen history carries the same shape. The flow apply path implements it transactionally.

Template

None — adopted by convention; the ritual lives in the packet directories’ scoped guidance.

Exact Review is the gate this transition passes through; Governed Read is the validation it runs before visibility.