# ADR 003 — Application-Owned Authoritative State

**Status:** Accepted

## Decision

The application, not the language model, will own authoritative story history and state.

## Context

Language models do not reliably preserve long-term continuity and should not be trusted as the sole record of facts, branches, checkpoints, or campaign history.

## Alternatives Considered

- rely on chat transcript/model context,
- rely on rolling summaries only,
- application-owned structured state plus immutable history.

## Reason

Application-owned state enables:

- persistence,
- rollback,
- branching,
- continuity,
- inspection,
- export,
- deterministic recovery,
- debugging.

## Consequences

- model outputs that imply state changes should be treated as proposals,
- state updates require validation,
- the database must remain authoritative even if the model contradicts it.