Engineering Philosophy
Five principles that govern every design decision in StateAnchor.
01
One source of truth
stateanchor.yaml is the only authoritative source. Nothing writes back to it automatically. Ever.
02
Deterministic over probabilistic
Parsing, diffing, gating, and validation are always deterministic. LLMs handle generation only.
03
Fail closed
When in doubt, block. A false positive is recoverable. A silent breaking change is not.
04
No silent failures
Every sync either completes with full provenance or fails explicitly. Partial success is failure.
05
Observed truth, not assumed truth
StateAnchor gates what goes through Git. The scanner detects what doesn't. Desired state and deployed reality are reconciled continuously, not assumed to match.