Continuation is allowed by evidence, not confidence.

null.select treats a runtime replacement as an authority transition. Before work resumes, it settles consequential effects, fences stale authority, validates the successor, and issues a fresh scoped lease.

When the destination cannot be proved, continuation stays held.

This is the central rule. Availability does not override evidence. Unknown effect semantics, unresolved reconciliation, expired authority, or incompatible successor capabilities prevent ordinary continuation.

Each fact has one responsible owner.

The control plane owns control facts

Execution lineage, runtime identity, fencing epoch, leases, actions, attempts, effects, evidence, and reconciliation state stay relational in PostgreSQL.

Adapters own destination semantics

Every action binds an immutable adapter release, capability digest, and schema digest. OpenAPI or MCP syntax alone does not prove effects or safe retry.

Customer systems own business truth

The destination remains authoritative for tickets, payments, deployments, and other business objects. null.select does not create a universal business schema.

What the control path guarantees.

Intent before dispatch

Consequential intent and its single-use permit are committed before an adapter call leaves the control boundary.

Explicit uncertainty

A lost response after possible dispatch becomes uncertain. A transport error never proves that the destination was unchanged.

Authoritative reconciliation

A separate verifier records present, absent, partial, conflicting, or unresolved—not a guessed Boolean.

Persisted fencing

Takeover advances the execution epoch transactionally. Mutations from the stale epoch are rejected even after process restarts.

One effect-capable lease

Only one current effect lease may exist for an execution. It is scoped, expiring, and bound to one runtime incarnation.

Bounded continuation

A recipient-bound capsule contains evidence and references, never credentials, approvals, hidden reasoning, or raw transcripts.

Execution and reconciliation answer different questions.

Adapter outcome

not_attempted, confirmed, rejected, or uncertain.

Reconciliation finding

present, absent, partial, conflicting, or unresolved.

What does not cross the handoff.

  • Destination credentials or service tokens
  • Human approvals reused as model authority
  • Hidden reasoning or chain-of-thought
  • Raw conversation or tool transcripts
  • Unbounded business payloads

Bind your first fenced runtime.

Open the client guide