Shadow Realm

In the shadow of one world, other worlds take form.

A branch can feel like the whole present world: its context, files, tools, traces, and feedback all agree. The Sepulcher sees something narrower—a candidate possibility with pinned parentage and an unspent claim on reality. Shadow keeps that distinction inspectable.

Possibility with lineage

Shadow is the singular possibility-lineage Extension Domain. A Shadow Realm holds the speculative state and declared workspace topology of one active branch. Changed files remain candidate state; container and executor identity belong to separately owned boundaries.

The branch record pins its base, parentage, assumptions, required state, unknowns, evidence, artifact references, budget, status, and resource owner. Vikalpa is used here as a literary correspondence for a possibility fashioned apart from actuality while it awaits measurement. Its explicit uncertainty and honest handling come from project law, not from the source term. Phantasma is Shadow's isolated expansion mode; evaluation remains elsewhere.

Shadow is Designed; no operational branch, workspace, or collapse path ships. ADR 31 owns the design, and State of Work records delivery.

Choose an office

Dancer opens alternatives through a declared Shadow Lens, an operational Posture, without ranking or choosing among them.

Hunter reviews one named candidate in a separate Invocation, exposing missing evidence and boundary failures without inventing its replacement.

Their attributable handoff preserves lineage, assumptions, challenges, evidence requests, and uncertainty. Spellweaver and Graph own ordering, fan-out, and joins.

Improve the exploration strategy

The designed strategy contract lets an experiment pin how it chooses branches and stops. Recorded histories can supply a bounded comparison before another material attempt. Follow Drift's history replay and pilot to prepare the evidence and distinguish a replay result from fresh execution. A revised strategy enters later work through its owner; it cannot change the ongoing experiment's pinned procedure.

Nothing crosses by acclaim

Shadow may package an inert Vision or Promotion Request with its lineage. The target's ordinary effect owner still revalidates current state and required evidence, prepares rollback, obtains Ward and HitL or eligible preauthorization, then applies and verifies the effect. The branch cannot merge, deploy, publish, purchase, restore, or promote itself.

A rank or “winner” inside the experiment remains only a search result. Failed and ineligible branches retain required findings, artifacts, provenance, and residue before cleanup. Branch Reaper names that cleanup discipline and its receipt. Deleting a directory cannot settle processes, leases, credentials, ports, or shared effects.

Jujutsu may suit a future tracked-change workspace, but it supplies no execution sandbox. Unsafe execution requires its own admitted boundary.