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feat(lifeboard): provenance — every fact can say where it came from - #317

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feat(lifeboard): provenance — every fact can say where it came from#317
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lifeboard/06-provenance

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@ivanmkc ivanmkc commented Sep 2, 2026

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The stack

# PR What it adds Tests at this point
1 #311 A real localStorage for the test suite on Node 25 viewer 747
2 #312 @ivanmkc/termchart-canvas; injectable interact transport canvas 473 · viewer 278
3 #313 lifeboard PWA: fact log, boards, service worker lifeboard 36
4 #314 Shell, family profiles, tap layer lifeboard 82
5 #315 The agent turn, four providers, Connections lifeboard 142
6 #316 Packs, recipes, shopping-list arithmetic lifeboard 231
7 #317 Provenance and lineage lifeboard 257
8 #318 Calendar, Gmail, mail triage lifeboard 301
9 #319 The bridge and long jobs cli 314 · lifeboard 320
10 #310 Proactivity, scheduled boards, Google sign-in cli 320 · lifeboard 343
11 #320 Persistence audit fixes: multi-tab, stale builds, no-storage boot lifeboard 350
12 #321 User guide, bridge setup, QA guide, persistence audit lifeboard 350
13 #322 A plan for third-party integrations (docs only) unchanged
14 #323 A practice drill a board can define: audio + Q&A canvas 485 · lifeboard 372
15 #325 Export and restore lifeboard 389
16 #326 Draft a message, approve it, then send lifeboard 399
17 #327 Hand long work to the Mac lifeboard 406
18 #328 A Packs screen, and authoring one by describing it lifeboard 418
19 #329 Activity — what changed, who changed it, undo lifeboard 428

Every branch in the stack was checked out on its own and verified independently: npm install, tsc --noEmit for every package, npm test across the workspace, and the offline e2e where it exists. All nineteen are green — no branch depends on a later one to build or pass. Full viewer e2e (11 suites, 106 assertions) was run on #312 as the behaviour-preservation evidence for the extraction.


Stack position: 7 of 10. Base: lifeboard/05-packs.

Every displayed fact can answer "where did this come from?" and take you to the document.

Answered from the log rather than from a side table. The log already records, for every change, what it was derived from, who made it and what it replaced — recorded at the moment the fact was created, because nothing else was possible. That is what makes provenance work at all; a derivation bolted on afterwards is a guess, and a guess about where a vaccination date came from is worse than nothing. Derivation records add only the two things the log cannot infer: which kind of step it was, and how confident a model was.

A source that has changed is flagged, never silently re-read. Re-running an extraction against a changed document behind someone's back is how a date quietly becomes a different date.

Lineage is drawn as a flow board because the thing people need is the shape — that a date came from one email through one extraction, or from three documents through a merge and a correction. A list of steps reads as bureaucracy.

Deep links live in a table as data. Every connector addresses a document differently and the formats change without warning; a broken link should be a one-line fix. Drive gets the page number, Gmail opens the thread.

Boards reach the rest of the app through an href prefix the shell intercepts. A board is data and cannot carry a click handler — giving it one would mean the agent authors behaviour rather than a picture. Anything else in an href is an ordinary link and leaves the app, which is what a source link should do.

A bug worth noting: derivations were paired to entries by timestamp, and a test caught two unrelated writes landing in the same millisecond — which mislabelled the history of the fact someone was trying to check. They are paired by sequence number now.

Verified: 257 unit tests, including the gate's example — a vaccination date traced back to a PDF page and an email paragraph, corrected, and flagged when the source changes.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

Answered from the log rather than from a side table. The log already records,
for every change, what it was derived from, who made it and what it replaced --
recorded at the moment the fact was created, because nothing else was possible.
That is what makes provenance work at all; a derivation bolted on afterwards is
a guess, and a guess about where a vaccination date came from is worse than
nothing. Derivation records add only the two things the log cannot infer: which
kind of step it was, and how confident a model was.

A source that has changed is flagged, never silently re-read. Re-running an
extraction against a changed document behind someone's back is how a date
quietly becomes a different date.

Lineage is drawn as a flow board because the thing people need is the shape --
that a date came from one email through one extraction, or from three documents
through a merge and a correction. A list of steps reads as bureaucracy.

Deep links live in a table as data. Every connector addresses a document
differently and the formats change without warning; a broken link should be a
one-line fix. Drive gets the page number, Gmail opens the thread.

Boards reach the rest of the app through an href prefix the shell intercepts. A
board is data and cannot carry a click handler -- giving it one would mean the
agent authors behaviour rather than a picture. Anything else in an href is an
ordinary link and leaves the app, which is what a source link should do.

Pairs a derivation to the entry it explains by sequence number, not timestamp: a
test caught two unrelated writes landing in the same millisecond, which
mislabelled the history of the fact someone was trying to check.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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