core/docs/assessment/10-layer-cards/M6-continuity-process.md

M6 — Continuity & Process

Kind: layer · Parent: CORE · Assessor: Opus 5 (Phase 2) Re-verified: 39331dbc (2026-07-28) — see the arc note below. Verified at: 8927c563 (2026-07-27) Liveness: partial-wiring-debt · Fitness: strained · Topology role: runtime boundary

The life itself. M6 is the layer that makes CORE an organism rather than a function call: a process that persists across time, accumulates capability across reboots, and resumes as the same life. Every other layer describes a capability; M6 describes the subject that has them. The foundational telos — "one continuous life" — is this layer's charter, and its condition is the single sharpest measure of the distance between what CORE is for and what CORE is.

Telos stages: replay/determinism, backbone-runtime · hosts every other stage (the cycle's runner) Macro role: Holds field, vault, session, and identity continuity over indefinite time; runs the heartbeat that lets the engine learn when nobody is talking to it.

Arc note — 2026-07-28 (39331dbc). PR-9 instrumented the accrual backstop (_accrue_in_turn): the guard stays broad, but a swallowed exception is now counted and named rather than writing the same None a quiet turn writes. H-11 CLOSED.

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Phase 3 correction (C-2, 05-phase3-findings.md): this card's "T1 vault and field excitation are discarded on exit by design" describes the default config only. The daemon forces persist_session_state=True (Shape B+ — "restored bit-exactly"), so residency machinery exists and is daemon-forced; open items are its exact coverage (chat/runtime.py:893–952) and horizon proof. The daemon's forced flag set is exactly {persist_session_state, consolidate_determinations, strict_identity_continuity} — see 20-component-cards/always-on-process.md.

⚠️ Correction to Phase 0 Finding 0-C and to the system map

Phase 0 recorded that the L11 always-on process is unbuilt. That is wrong, and the error is instructive.

chat/always_on.py::run_continuous (279 lines) and chat/always_on_daemon.py::run_daemon (195 lines) exist and are reachable from the CLI as core always-on (core/cli.py:244 cmd_always_on). Both landed 2026-06-14 (18e25580, efd280d4 / PR #758) — five days after the .system-map/ snapshot of 2026-06-09 that declared "no forever entrypoint exists." Phase 0 inherited that claim without re-verification; Phase 2's re-verification obligation is exactly what caught it.

This is the clearest possible vindication of schema principle P3 (stamped verification) and of the taxonomy's rule that the map is a prior, never a source. It also means the assessment's own worst risk is real: a 48-day-old map is wrong precisely where the project moved fastest. Every card in Phases 2–3 must assume the map is stale on anything load-bearing.

What remains true from Phase 0: the spike was never run to completion and never recorded, and the built process is ungated. Those are the findings below, and they are different — and more actionable — than "unbuilt."

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What it is / What it does

M6 is two halves at very different maturity, joined by a checkpoint.

The built half. engine_state/EngineStateStore performs atomic checkpointing (same-dir temp → fsync → os.replace, mode-bits preserved) of the RecognizerRegistry, the DiscoveryCandidate working set, and a manifest, written at turn boundaries and reloaded on the next process start. A revision mismatch warns and never refuses — "reboot is recovery, not control flow." A reboot_event audit line records that a lifetime was lost and regained. On top of this sits run_continuous: an unbounded heartbeat loop where each beat advances idle_tick (continuous learning), records closure and learning evidence, self-checkpoints on real work, and checkpoints once at exit. run_daemon wraps it with a single-instance lock (one life per engine-state dir, lock file deliberately never unlinked), SIGINT/SIGTERM-wired stop checked before each beat and interrupting the inter-beat wait, and a load-time identity guard. A lived_life.json report feeds the Workbench's Lived Life surface.

The unbuilt half — restated correctly. Not the process: the proof, the gate, and the residency. The 24h+ no-drift soak has a complete falsifiable harness (evals/l10_always_on, four predicates H1 closure / H2 bounded-idle / H3 convergence / H4 reboot-resume, each with *_holds and *_bites test pairs, plus evals/l10_continuity) and has never been run to a recorded artifact. And per ADR-0146 the T1 vault and field excitation remain deliberately ephemeral, so what compounds across reboots is the recognizer/discovery layer — not the recalled or excited substrate.

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Contract

• Inputs: DerivedRecognizer objects, DiscoveryCandidate objects, turn_count, CORE_ENGINE_STATE_DIR, git short-revision, prior on-disk checkpoint.
• Outputs: engine_state/{recognizers,discovery_candidates}.jsonl, manifest.json, lived_life.json, buffered reboot_event, restored working set, advisory RuntimeWarning on revision mismatch.
• Invariants:
  • Atomic checkpoint — crash between write and replace leaves the prior checkpoint intact — pin: tests/test_adr_0146_engine_state.py — suite: none — status: not run by any suite.
  • Reboot round-trip byte-identity — state after (boot, N turns, reboot, reload) equals state after (boot, N turns) — pin: flagged by the system map as possibly schema-as-decoration — status: unverified at this SHA.
  • Versor closure under long-horizon idle (VERSOR_CEILING) — pin: tests/test_l10_always_on_soak.py — suite: none — status: not run by any suite.
  • One life per engine-state dir — pin: tests/test_l10_always_on_daemon.py — suite: none.

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Design vs build

• Design: docs/adr/L10-runtime-model-scope.md (scope only — process shape, state partitioning, reboot recovery, async HITL left open), ADR-0146 (Shape B hybrid checkpoint chosen over Shape A daemon / Shape C audit replay), ADR-0156/0157/0158, L11-hitl-async-queue-scope.md. The design record is now behind the code: ADR-0146 explicitly rejected the Shape A daemon, and a daemon was subsequently built. No ADR ratifies always_on_daemon.py. That is a governance gap, not merely a documentation lag.
• Build: partial-wiring-debt. Key files: engine_state/__init__.py, chat/always_on.py, chat/always_on_daemon.py, core/cli.py::cmd_always_on, evals/l10_always_on/, evals/l10_continuity/.
• Evidence:
  • Always-on loop and daemon exist and are CLI-reachable — code-read — chat/always_on.py:179, core/cli.py:244 — would-fail-if-absent: yes (CLI command would not resolve).
  • Falsifiable soak harness with holds/bites predicate pairs exists — code-read — evals/l10_always_on/predicates.py, tests/test_l10_always_on_soak.py — would-fail-if-absent: yes.
  • Long-horizon no-drift result — absent. No JSON artifact under evals/l10_always_on/ or evals/l10_continuity/. would-fail-if-absent: n/a — the claim has no evidence.
  • Suite enforcement — absent. No l10/always_on test appears in any of the 21 TEST_SUITES tuples. would-fail-if-absent: no — nothing runs these pins.
  • Persistence defaults — persist_session_state=False, strict_identity_continuity=False (core/config.py:285,293) — measurement — the continuity machinery is off by default.

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Capacity

• Designed: an indefinitely-running single process holding field + vault + session without drift, contemplating in slack, resuming as the same life through interruption.
• Measured: heartbeat loop runs for a bounded heartbeats count or until stop; checkpoint round-trip works at turn granularity; no measured horizon exists — the longest verified run is whatever the short soak tests exercise, and those run in no suite. The compounding surface is the recognizer/discovery layer only.
• Ceilings: T1 vault and field excitation are discarded on exit by design (ADR-0146), so recall and excitation substrate reset every process. Cross-reboot EngineIdentity verification is shelved. Async HITL-while-serving is still CLI-synchronous (W-009 open).

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Dependencies & provenance

• feeds → M4 (ChatRuntime is the sole consumer of the checkpoint store); recalls-from → M3 (recognizer registry) and M1/M5 (discovery candidates); reads → M1 (vault, deliberately ephemeral) and M0 (field, deliberately ephemeral); verifies → MV (round-trip byte-identity is a replay obligation); depends-on → MG (same-life identity continuity overlaps identity doctrine, not yet wired to the identity axes).
• Owning ADRs: ADR-0146, ADR-0156, ADR-0157, ADR-0158, ADR-0220 (identity/build-provenance split); scopes L10-runtime-model-scope.md, L11-hitl-async-queue-scope.md. Unowned: chat/always_on_daemon.py.

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Stage coverage

Stage	Verdict	Evidence
backbone-runtime	claimed-only	Process exists and runs; no measured horizon, no suite-enforced pin, continuity flags default off
replay/determinism	claimed-only	Round-trip byte-identity invariant flagged as possible schema-as-decoration; unverified at this SHA
(hosting the cycle)	covered, degraded	idle_tick genuinely advances learning per beat; but what compounds is recognizers/discovery only — field and vault reset

Zone roster: L10-11-runtime-identity (partial-wiring-debt → revised: build materially more complete than mapped), engine-state (live-internal, confirmed), edge-sync (inert, not re-verified), core-protocol-ctp (spike, not re-verified).

Rollup note: zone liveness is a weakest-link rollup and is not a completion rate. M6 is better built than either the map or Phase 0 reported, and less proven than the existence of the code suggests. Those are not in tension — they are the layer's actual condition.

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Judgment

Fitness: strained. Not wrong-solution: Shape B checkpointing is a sound mechanism, and the daemon built on top of it is a reasonable shape. Strained because the layer's proof obligations have not kept pace with its code, and because its central design document still rejects the architecture that was subsequently built. A layer whose invariants are pinned by tests that no suite runs is protected by nothing.

Honest wrinkles:

• The most telos-critical component in CORE is enforced by zero running tests. Every l10/always_on pin sits outside all 21 suites. By the project's own doctrine (a pin in no suite never runs), the continuous life is unguarded.
• DriveGradientMap is constructed and never read. chat/runtime.py:716 builds self._drive_map; no site reads it. Deleting it would change no output. This is textbook decoration and is recorded here rather than fixed.
• ExertionMeter is exercised (record at :2912, fatigue at :2913) but its output flows only to drive_summaries and fatigue_index — telemetry. Fatigue gates no decision. It is live-internal, not load-bearing.
• The daemon has no ratifying ADR while the governing ADR-0146 explicitly rejected the daemon shape. Whatever the right answer, the record currently contradicts the code.
• "One continuous life" remains, in substance, many short lives sharing a recognizer checkpoint — but the reason is now a deliberate ADR-0146 scoping decision about vault/field ephemerality, not an absence of process machinery. That reframes the L10 question entirely: it is no longer "build the process" but "decide what the process is allowed to hold."

Open questions:

• Run the long-horizon soak and record the artifact — what horizon does the engine actually survive? (→ ruling: this is the ADR-0146 Phase-4 spike, still owed)
• Should l10/always_on pins enter a suite, and which? (→ Phase 4)
• Does the daemon need a ratifying ADR that supersedes ADR-0146's Shape-A rejection? (→ ruling)
• Is vault/field ephemerality still the right call now that a real process exists to hold them? (→ ruling; this is the highest-value M6 question)