# cart

**How two parties work out what something means before one of them changes it —
including when neither of them knows.**

- [The agreement](.loom/published/cart.md) — `v0`

**A cart is one bounded exchange.** *It starts, it runs, it **converts**, and then
it is gone. The directory is only where a cart happens.*

## What it depends on

**[`annotating/v0`](https://git.hypertheory-labs.dev/loom/annotating).** *Dailies
are annotated, and everything here rests on that.*

## Four roles it leaves to you

**An agreement adopted with these uncast has not been adopted. It has been
filed.**

- **Where a cart lives**
- **What durable record declines go into**
- **What isolates work in progress while a cart is open**
- **Who decides when the round ends** — *and this one is not a preference.
  **When one party cannot feel a cost, the decision belongs to the party who
  can.** An agent will not feel a cart filling and will keep writing until told
  to stop.*

*The agreement asks these as prompts. **Answer them where you adopt it**, not
here.*

## Known and unresolved

**An out-of-scope need has no exit.** *Conversion emits the artifact and the
declines — and a thing that came up, was correctly out of scope, and was neither
refused nor decided is neither of those.* **Today "out of scope" means "lost."**

*Proposed as a third exit and not yet adopted; it is loom's to make. Recorded in
[`bedrock`](https://git.hypertheory-labs.dev/loom/bedrock)'s event log, cart
`almanac`.*

## Provenance of this copy

**Adopted by `staribridge/substrate` on 2026-08-21 and reconciled to `v0` the
same day.** *Read many times, never edited.* **If loom's own copy differs, this
one is wrong and should be replaced before anybody adopts it.**

---

## `v1` — 2026-09-07

**Three additions. Adopters of `v0` have a reconciliation.**

**The cart is local and not committed**, because a committed cart in a shared
repository grows a third daily by itself — *the agreement's defence against one
assumes somebody asks, and version control does not require anybody to ask.* **It
is also what makes a round actually end:** *committed, "gone" means "no longer
live"; ignored, gone means gone.*

**The write-ahead log**, for findings that are not yet decisions, transferred to
the durable record or discarded at conversion. *Invented in practice and load-
bearing for weeks before it was written down here.*

**The durable record must outlive the cart**, and therefore cannot be inside it.
*Implied by "durable" and never stated, so an adopter could have cast it to a path
in `.loom/cart/` and this document would not have told them otherwise.*