Core concepts

Six ideas explain how Kortecx achieves exactly-once delivery with transparent recovery.

Mote

A mote is one content-addressed step — the atomic unit of work. It is immutable and identified by the hash of its content, so the same inputs always produce the same mote. Re-deriving a mote that already exists is a no-op: you re-read it, you don't re-run it.

Journal

The journal is an append-only log and the single source of truth. Every state transition is recorded as a typed event. Nothing in the system is authoritative except what the journal says happened. Because it is append-only, recovery is just replay.

Projection

A projection is a pure fold over the journal — current state, re-derived from the event history on every restart. Projections are never the source of truth; they are a cache you can always rebuild. This is why a crash is recoverable: throw away in-memory state, replay the journal, and the projection comes back identical.

Commit protocol

Writes go through one of three commit strategies, chosen per operation:

• IdempotentByConstruction — the write is naturally safe to repeat (content-addressed motes).
• StageThenCommit — stage the effect, then atomically commit a journal record that makes it durable.
• ValidateThenCommit — validate the staged result against expectations before committing.

Together these give exactly-once delivery: a partially-applied effect is either completed on replay or never observed.

Refusal gate

The refusal gate rejects unsafe work up front, before any effect runs. Out-of-scope or disallowed operations never start — they are refused, not rolled back. Safety is an invariant, not a cleanup step.

CapabilityBroker

The CapabilityBroker is the single door to world effects — filesystem, network, shell. Nothing touches the outside world except through the broker, which is where policy is enforced. One door means one place to reason about what the runtime can and cannot do.