WARP DRIVE

A POSIX-shaped membrane over witnessed causal history. Mount it like a filesystem. Edit files like normal. Every read is a lawful projection from a coordinate; every write is an Intent against an explicit basis. The bytes on disk are not the truth — they are the latest hologram.

mount -t warpdrive @main:/repo  /Users/me/project
mount -t warpdrive @agent-1:/repo /Users/me/agent-lane

# vim, ripgrep, Cursor, your build script, Claude Code — they all see "files"
# WARP DRIVE turns every save into an Intent and every read into an observation
# Two mounts of the same repo on different lanes; no Git worktrees needed

Status

Vapor. Nothing is built. This repository currently exists to hold the design — see docs/TECHNICAL_DEEP_DIVE.md.

The deep dive is intentionally substrate-agnostic. WARP DRIVE will work against any runtime that speaks the Continuum causal-history protocol — Echo today, others in principle.

What you'll learn from the deep dive

1. The pitch in concrete mechanism — what cat, :w, git diff, and inotify look like on top of a causal-history substrate.
2. The minimum vocabulary to talk about this honestly — WARP, Continuum, coordinate, optic, hologram, suffix, receipt. About ten words; each one earns its place.
3. How a read becomes an observation and how a write becomes an Intent.
4. Why the architecture is substrate-agnostic — same client, four plausible backends sketched (Echo, git-warp, Postgres-warp, in-memory dev).
5. What multi-lane reality unlocks — humans and AI agents on the same project, on different coordinates, without merge folklore.
6. The bold moves — what becomes possible when the filesystem itself is history-aware.
7. The non-goals — what WARP DRIVE deliberately is not.
8. A credible v0.0.1 path — four steps from nothing to a useful mount.

Origin

WARP DRIVE began as a cool-ideas card in the Echo runtime backlog under the name WARPDrive POSIX Materialization Optic. The architectural frame ("files are materialized readings, not substrate truth") comes from There Is No Graph, an Echo architecture note. The Continuum protocol layer that makes substrate independence real is described in Echo's Continuum Transport note.

This repo lifts that idea into its own project so it can grow without inheriting Echo's roadmap.

License

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.