2 posts tagged with "data"

Most of the time, the dangerous question in a distributed system isn't "what does this delete cascade to?" It's "what does it not cascade to — and are you sure?"

We spend a lot of energy reasoning about the edges that do fire: delete a Marquee, and a chain of consequences unfolds. But the bugs that wake you at 3am are usually the opposite shape. Someone toggles an innocuous setting — disables a Prop, edits a Secret, demotes a teammate — and a long-running environment they didn't mean to touch quietly falls over. The edge that surprised them is one nobody designed; it emerged because some well-meaning "keep things in sync on every save" hook reached one relationship too far.

Here is the support ticket we never want to receive: "I stopped my Genie to save money over the weekend, and when I came back, everything it had learned about my codebase was gone."

For an AI coding agent, that's the worst possible failure. The agent's value compounds over time — its working state, its history, the files it wrote, the config it tuned — and all of it lives on disk, in Docker volumes, not in the container. So we drew a hard line early: stopping a Genie must never touch its data. Only one explicit, confirmed action deletes it. This post is about that contract and the small amount of code that makes "stop" and "delete" genuinely different.