A pin promises to outlive the compaction, and nothing could retire one. "IN
FLIGHT: two workers" was true when written and false an hour later; a peer's
"only the FOURTEEN primitives" is sixteen. Both sit beside accurate pins wearing
identical confidence, and the next reader inherits them as fact.
commandments journal remember "<the fact now>" --supersedes=<n>
commandments journal pins
The supersession lives on the entry that DOES the correcting, so the store stays
strictly append-only — nothing rewrites or removes a line, and the older pin
stays readable with the newer one naming it. A record that can lose things is one
nobody trusts, and surviving is the whole promise.
Only LIVE pins are carried forward, which fixes both places at once: the block a
compacted agent wakes to, and the summariser's own instructions. Recovery lines
now carry when the fact was filed — the "sixteen" case had nothing saying when it
was measured.
A pin written before the field existed still reads back. A journal on disk holds
open work no summary can reconstruct, so the marked slot exists precisely so a
legacy line whose text carries a tab cannot be misread as a reference.
There is deliberately no bare strike: every correction carries a replacement
fact, because "this is obsolete" costs the same keystrokes as saying what is true
now and leaves the record worse.