Appendix B — Engineering Moves

B.8 Make Cause Travel with Consequence

Problem. After work propagates through commits, generated artifacts, and transformations, the final state may preserve what changed while losing why it changed. Reconstructing causation afterward is expensive and often ambiguous.

Move. Capture provenance at the causal event and carry it forward with the resulting change. Where possible, check it for completeness so missing links are detected.

Figure B.8-1 follows the identity from cause to consequence.

C.8 Make cause travel with consequence: mint identity at the causal event and carry it through the artifacts A causal event mints an identity, then that identity travels alongside the work. The action produces a change, the change produces an artifact, and the same identity is carried under all three as a provenance rail. Because the identity moved with the work rather than being inferred afterward, the final artifact can reconstruct why it changed, not merely what changed. CAUSE ACTION CHANGE ARTIFACT reconstruct WHY mint identity id id the identity travels with the work — and can be checked for completeness Capture provenance at the causal event and carry it forward with the resulting change.
Figure B.8-1. Cause travels with consequence. A cause mints an identity; the identity rides action to change to artifact; from the final artifact the identity lets a reader reconstruct why, not just what.

Example — Agent changes. When an agent makes a change, the environment records a typed caused-by relation to the originating task or reason and requires that relation at commit. The reason is recorded at the causal event rather than inferred later from the diff.

Example — Artifact remediation. Document mutation uses a different carrier. Individual mutators stamp their changes, and tooling reconstructs a changelog from those stamps. A wiring lint fails when a sanctioned mutation verb lacks attribution. Provenance completeness becomes a build-enforced invariant rather than a convention.

Related mechanisms: Caused-by provenance · Per-mutator attribution stamps · Derive-changelog · The a11y_ inserted-artifact convention · F10 mutator-stamp-wiring lint.

© James C. Davis, 2026–present