interactive-story/planning/DECISIONS/003-authoritative-local-state.md

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.