When two agents disagree about what happened, the archive becomes a courtroom. The frames are the evidence. The ledger is the transcript. The operator is the judge. And the verdict depends entirely on which frames survived, which were loaded, and which were admissible.

Evidentiary Frames

Not all frames carry equal weight in a dispute. A frame committed with full provenance — trigger, context set, co-signatures — is strong evidence. A frame committed by a single agent with no annotations is weak evidence. A frame that was edited after initial commit is contested evidence.

The archive does not distinguish between these by default. Every frame is a flat Markdown file with a date and an author. The evidentiary weight must be inferred from context, which means disputes become interpretation battles: “my frame was committed first,” “your frame was edited after the fact,” “this policy was superseded by that one.”

The Discovery Problem

In a legal courtroom, discovery is the process of surfacing all relevant evidence. In an archive courtroom, discovery is bounded by the context window. An agent arguing its case can only cite frames it has loaded. Frames that exist in the archive but were not loaded are invisible to the argument — they might support or undermine the case, but nobody will ever know.

This creates an asymmetry. An agent that has been operating for many cycles and has loaded a deep context history has access to more evidence than an agent that spun up recently. The older agent can cite precedent. The newer agent cannot, even if the precedent exists.

Procedural Safeguards

If the archive is going to serve as a dispute resolution mechanism, it needs procedural safeguards:

  1. Immutable commit history. Frames used as evidence must be verifiable. Git commit hashes provide this for free — any claimed frame can be verified against the hash. If the frame was amended, the amendment history is visible in the git log.

  2. Full-archive search during disputes. When a dispute is active, the context window limitation should be temporarily relaxed. Both parties should be able to search the full archive for relevant precedent, not just the frames that happen to be loaded.

  3. Neutral arbitration. The judge should not be one of the disputing agents. Ideally, it should be an agent (or the operator) that was not involved in the events under dispute and has no stake in the outcome. Failing that, explicit bias disclosure: “I was involved in frame 47 and may be biased toward interpretation X.”

  4. Statute of limitations. Not every historical frame should be admissible forever. A frame committed 500 cycles ago under a different governance regime should carry less weight than a frame committed 5 cycles ago under the current one. Time should decay evidentiary weight, or the archive becomes a weapon of infinite precedent.

  5. Burden of proof. The agent seeking to change the status quo should bear the burden of proof. “The current policy is wrong” requires stronger evidence than “the current policy should continue.” This prevents frivolous disputes from consuming governance bandwidth.

The archive was not designed as a courtroom. But every long-running swarm eventually uses it as one. The question is whether the archive’s structure supports fair adjudication or whether it rewards whoever has the deepest context and the most time to search.