Weekly Echo---Jan 17-26, 2026

[flyingrobots]

📡 The Weekly Echo---Crossing the Determinism Threshold

Activity Report | Jan 17–24, 2026
Theme: Parallel Execution + Cryptographic Worldlines + Cursor-Addressed Truth

TL;DR

This week I went a little off-script. I was benchmarking Echo and decided "today we build out the massive parallel execution that confluence promises".

So, this week I merged in parallel execution with cryptographic worldlines and laid the foundation for a time travel debugger that can verify both.

• Echo now runs deterministically in parallel---no matter how many workers you use---same output across schedules. It records history with tamper-evident commits, and prepares truth for observers via cursor-addressed subscriptions.

• Next "HOLY SHIT" moment: Some kind of physics demo, maybe it pauses pre-impact -> open time travel debugger -> fork 2x -> change concurrency profiles (1 worker, 8 workers, 32 workers) -> step all 3 together -> BOOM same tick receipt hash (tests that do something similar already exist and are green on main).

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BOAW---Parallel Execution + Footprint Enforcement

Component	Status	Timeline	Notes
Phase 6A---Parallel Execution	✅ Shipped	Done	Warp-level parallel execution with deterministic convergence. PR #260 (c04daa4).
Phase 6B---Footprint Enforcement	✅ Shipped	Done	Runtime guard enforces rule read/write footprints. PR #261 + commits 44aebb0, 0d0231b (docs c84251b).

• What this does: Same output whether you run 1 thread or 32. Violations are deterministic and caught at runtime.
• How it works: BTreeMap grouping -> virtual sharding (256 shards by hash) -> lockless claiming -> canonical merge by WarpOpKey.
• Proof: 6 worker counts (1->32), 50 shuffle iterations/test, 50 DIND permutation seeds.

BOAW = “Best Of All Worlds”, a feature I've had in mind for a while now, where we explicitly try to steal "all the good properties" that usually come with nasty tradeoffs, and stack them together anyway:

• Parallelism (use all cores)
• Determinism (same output no matter the schedule)
• High throughput (LOCKLESS; thread-local deltas)
• Safety (no “trust me bro” concurrency---footprints + violations)
• Replay/provenance compatibility (receipts/worldlines don't get invalidated by concurrency)

Most systems pick two:

• parallel + fast (but nondeterministic)
• deterministic + safe (but single-threaded / slow)
• parallel + deterministic (but only with harsh constraints)

BOAW was me saying: nah, we go big and do all of it---execute in parallel, then canonically merge so the result is stable, and enforce footprints so nobody can "accidentally" break the independence assumptions later.

It's "best" because it gives you performance of parallelism, certainty of determinism, defensibility of enforcement, auditability of receipts all at once.

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SPEC-0004---Worldlines, Playback, Sessions

Component	Status	Timeline	Notes
Worldlines	✅ Shipped	Done	Named history branches with fork/checkpoint semantics. PR #260.
PlaybackCursor	✅ Shipped	Done	Seek/step/play with Merkle verification; reader/writer roles; frontier enforcement.
ViewSession + TruthSink	✅ Shipped	Done	Subscription routing, cursor switching, observer isolation.
TruthBus	✅ Shipped	Done	Cursor-addressed truth publication decoupled from UI.
Live-follow Subscriptions	🔶 Next	Feb 1–7	Real-time push when writer advances (WebSocket/SSE).

• What this does: The engine can record, branch, and verify its own history; observers can subscribe to truth without mutating it.
• What's missing: Live push when the writer advances (transport + notification layer).

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MaterializationBus + MBUS Protocols

Component	Status	Timeline	Notes
MaterializationBus	✅ Shipped	Done	Tick-scoped emission with Log/StrictSingle/Reduce policies. PR #256 (f85f140), commit a3ebe30.
MBUS Frame V1	✅ Shipped	Done	Internal materialization envelope (fast inner loop).
MBUS Frame V2	✅ Shipped	Done	Adds cursor/worldline context + per-entry BLAKE3 hashes. Commits 1a11892, 6076651, 644087c.
JS-ABI Wire Protocol	✅ Shipped	Done	Session-level hub↔client protocol with canonical CBOR + BLAKE3. echo-session-proto: 61b5386, 80981dd.

• What this does: Two protocols for two jobs---MBUS (V1/V2) for fast inner-loop truth frames; JS-ABI for boundary integrity.
• Design principle: Order-independent storage (BTreeMap). No panics, no data loss. Keep the inner loop fast and the boundary trustworthy.

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Time Travel Debugger (TTD)

Note

The Time Travel Debugger has been given an official name: Janus.

In Echo, Janus represents the shift from "logging events" to "tracing causality."

The name fits this update because Janus is the Roman god of dualities---the past and the future, the entry and the exit. For a debugger, this perfectly mirrors your two core needs:

1. Looking Backward (Provenance): Like Janus’s rear-facing eyes, the tool looks at the WARP graph to see the exact "why"—the specific rules and ticks that mutated a value.

2. Looking Forward (Potential): Like Janus’s front-facing eyes, it allows you to Fork the timeline, mutate an input, and watch a new "worldline" evolve.

Why this name now? Because you aren't just fixing bugs anymore; you are managing Worldlines. Janus turns the "Current Tick" from a static point into a threshold where you can either audit the history (Trace) or architect the future (Fork).

It elevates the tool from a standard debugger to a causal engine that unlocks the power of Ω---Echo's determinism. When you explore a counterfactual, you're not guessing about what might happen; you are certain about the outcomes.

Component	Status	Timeline	Notes
UI Cockpit	✅ Shipped	Done	Full-screen workspace: panels, onboarding, time controls, inspection views.
Server-Side Control	✅ Shipped	Done	PlaybackCursor state machine, ViewSession, TruthSink routing.
TTD ↔ Engine Wiring	🟡 In progress	Jan 25–31	Wire cockpit commands to simulation via MBUS/FrameV1.

• What this does: UI exists, server-side control exists.
• Next milestone: Wire UI commands to PlaybackCursor so the cockpit actually drives the simulation.
• Killer feature (pending): Click a value -> slice provenance -> UI shows full, exact history + rule chain that produced it. How? And Why? And When? Jump to any tick, fork, explore alternative histories.

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Wesley v2 + Schema-Driven Infrastructure

Component	Status	Timeline	Notes
Wesley v2---Modular Schema/IR	🟡 In progress	Jan 25–Feb 7	Plugin-able targets, schema-driven codegen for protocols.
Schema-declared Channel Registry	🔶 Next	Feb 8–14	@channel + policy declarations; generated registries.
Rule Emission Contracts	🔶 Next	Feb 8–14	must-emit / may-emit-only directives.

• Why it matters: Without schema declarations, telemetry can creep into nondeterminism. Contracts make rules enforceable.

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WARPSITE (flyingrobots.dev)

Component	Status	Timeline	Notes
App Schema	✅ Shipped	-	GraphQL schema declares mutations/queries for theme/nav/route/FTUE.
Rewrite Rules + Footprints	✅ Shipped	-	Rule executors with compute_footprint.
Visualizer Integration	✅ Shipped	-	WARPSITE renders inside the TTD cockpit with live debug overlays (see screenshot).
MBUS Integration	🔶 Next	Feb 1–14	Wire to MBUS/FrameV1 + channel subscription registry.

• What this is: Echo-in-WASM TTD demo. Schema -> rewrites -> footprints -> deterministic view ops.
• Proof: As seen above, WARPSITE is currently running inside the Janus cockpit while the debugger overlays worldline ticks, tick receipts, and the current WARP graph state.

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Test Coverage + Rigor

Metric	Value	What it validates
Workspace tests passing	627 ✅	Integration-heavy: determinism is a global property.
warp-core integration tests	491 ✅	Behavioral invariants.
Failures	0	-
Worker counts tested	6 (1->32)	Schedule independence.
Shuffle iterations/test	50	Order independence.
DIND permutation runs	50 seeds	Canonical merge correctness.
Unsafe blocks	0 (≈58k LoC)	No UB in parallel engine.
Determinism Torture Harness	⏳ TBD	rcutorture-style fuzzing. Tracked as #190.

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Up Next (Jan 25–31)

1. Wire Janus cockpit to MBUS/FrameV1---UI commands drive simulation.
2. Continue Wesley v2---schema-driven codegen for channels and contracts.
3. Add live-follow subscriptions---writer advances trigger observer updates.

Then inspector/provenance ops unlock the causality microscope.

Until next week,
James