Why a research agent needs one canonical truth

Research workflows lose trust when the scheduler, the agent, the notebook, the chat thread and the publication each tell a slightly different story. The failure is quiet: nothing errors, but the number in the manuscript no longer matches the number in the run.

HowHow treats durable events and immutable artifacts as the authority. Providers remain replaceable workers. A provider can report success without proving semantic completion, so the system records task identity, accepted handles, leases, budgets, artifacts, evidence and gate outcomes before changing research state.

Events are append-only and the state projection is rebuildable from events plus immutable artifacts. That means a crash costs time, not truth, and the projection is never the only copy.

Ambiguous execution blocks rather than silently dispatching again. A duplicate run is worse than a paused one, because it makes the record ambiguous in a way that is expensive to untangle later.