board: storage portability — Quack owns query semantics, the cycle seal owns durable commit, storage supplies capabilities

[AdaWorldAPI]

This is an architecture-only follow-up to #1328, which had already merged and so could not be amended. One board entry; no code, no trait, no backend. Alpha, Rubicon and revision.rs are unchanged and not redefined.

Rubicon commits intent. Revision judges the result. The cycle seal commits state.

Planning
    ↓  Rubicon: intent becomes action
CognitiveWork / Action
    ↓
transient execution: folds + Alpha overlay (transient, discardable, whole-row attention claims)
    ↓
Evaluation / revision.rs — epistemic judgment, performs no write
    ├─ NoIncrease, or IncreaseEligible with docket incomplete → Plan → Planning (re-deliberate)
    ├─ Suspend → held in Evaluation (tension open)
    └─ IncreaseEligible + counterfactual Necessary → Commit (accepted)
           ↓  0..many casts (BatchWriter::cast)
cycle seal: DetachedCycleBatch::freeze → one WAL write per cycle — performs no epistemic evaluation
    ↓
durable net change: today a full 512-byte image per dirty row; future candidate: SparseDelta
    ↓
backend mapping: existing seam WalSink::commit_cycle → LanceCycleWriter

Storage portability

1. Quack's resolved numeric Query is independent of physical storage. Storage format is replaceable; query semantics are not.
2. Backend capability resolution happens once, before execution, never per row. A backend never approximates Quack semantics. Each part of a query runs exactly on the backend, or locally over the numeric lanes it supplies, or binding fails before execution.
3. 64k parallel work, Kanban and thought scheduling are not backend requirements.
4. Transient work is amortized into durable transitions at persist_sink's cycle seal: many casts → one WAL write → one DatasetVersion. Rubicon, in current code, is the pre-execution Planning → CognitiveWork crossing, and revision is the post-action judgment. Neither is the write.
5. Alpha is not a storage contract. It is a discardable transient overlay: whole-row claims carrying only an attention stamp (no payload, no field data), tracked by a population bitset. A future durable sparse-change contract, written SparseDelta here as architecture vocabulary only, could represent changed coordinates over immutable semantic identity and support merge-on-read. Its representation is unresolved and nothing is implemented.
6. (cycle, batch_hash) is today's semantic generation and DatasetVersion is physical history; they are deliberately distinct. A future NodeGuid × Version lineage extends this and never aliases backend snapshot, file or sequence ids.
7. Lance/MOCA, RocksDB, Iceberg, DuckDB and S3 are plausible adapters with different capabilities, not promised equivalent implementations, and none is "Alpha storage".
8. S3's minimal useful mapping: one immutable commit object per cycle, plus an optional manifest/generation pointer.
9. How a sparse change maps onto Iceberg remains an explicit later experiment.
10. DuckDB can also act as a differential semantic oracle for Quack (quack/tests/duckdb_differential.rs).

Source audit

• revision.rs is pure policy.
  • GadamerRevision::revise produces a RevisionDelta.
  • RevisionVerdict::is_acceptable() holds only for IncreaseEligible with counterfactual Necessary.
  • Its output types deliberately stop before any write.
  • The verdict is routed by KanbanColumn::advance_on_revision: accepted → Commit; eligible-but-unattacked or NoIncrease → Plan; Suspend → hold. Revision never prunes.
  • Neither function has a production caller; only tests and an example call them.
• Gap, recorded and not fixed: today's seal is not gated on revision acceptance.
  • A cycle seals whatever artifact casts it holds.
  • Kanban moves, including Evaluation → Commit, ride along in SweepSlot::paired_move and are applied after the seal.
  • The Commit column's "calcify" step is itself declared, not implemented.
• Field-level dirtiness is tracked nowhere. The write path is per row: SweepSlot.row, with one final image per dirty row per cycle. The only attribute-level change model is dir-sim's in-memory Overlay / Change::SetAttribute.
• Existing seams:
  • read side: quack::lower, mask-risc validate, Activation::resolve_for_context;
  • write side: WalSink, implemented by LanceCycleWriter.
• Smallest real seam for a future SparseDelta: DetachedCycleBatch::freeze → WalSink::commit_cycle. Changed coordinates are derivable there by comparing each row's final image against CycleFrame.base_version. That comparison does not exist today.

Not here

No RocksDB, Iceberg, DuckDB or S3 backend, no Storage trait or capability enum, and no SparseDelta type. Alpha, Rubicon, revision.rs, the split-tunnel writer and the cycle writer are unchanged. Revision does not persist, and the seal does not evaluate. No performance claim.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01G22yT6htkcdyXsihxxXdrg

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Documentation
  • Added an architecture and source audit documenting the query contract, cycle write path, and current and proposed storage backend capabilities.
  • Added the audit to the documentation index.

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• .claude/board/entries/2026-10-05-quack-storage-portability.md
• .claude/board/entries/README.md

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The pull request adds an architecture and source-audit document about Quack’s query contract, current cycle-based persistence path, and possible backend mappings. It also adds the document to the board entries index. No storage implementation changes are included.

Changes

Quack Storage Portability

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Portable query boundary .claude/board/entries/2026-10-05-quack-storage-portability.md, .claude/board/entries/README.md	The document defines Quack’s query semantics, capability binding, and lifecycle boundaries. The index adds the entry.
Current storage path .claude/board/entries/2026-10-05-quack-storage-portability.md	The document describes Alpha and Rubicon roles, cycle sealing, full-row persistence, version distinctions, and recovery from sealed landings.
Proposed mappings and scope .claude/board/entries/2026-10-05-quack-storage-portability.md	The document describes SparseDelta and several backend mappings as proposed or unbuilt, and lists scope exclusions.

Priority: ⬇️ Low

Estimated code review effort: 2 (Simple) | ~10 minutes

Change: Other

Suggested reviewers: claude

Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to 9b297

This change adds and indexes an architecture document, with no reported storage implementation changes or actionable merge-blocking risk.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 0…
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title accurately summarizes the main change: it separates Quack query semantics, durable commits, and storage capabilities.

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_{A rabbit reads the query lanes,
And checks where each cycle lands.
Full rows rest in sealed-up stores,
New backend maps remain in scores.
Then hops away with tidy plans.}

_{Comment @coderabbitai help to get the list of available commands.}

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(requestId: bb99c574-48cf-4ac1-8832-826eb9d371f9)