Allocate Collision-Ledger Entries for Parallel Work

When two agents work in parallel, they need stable, non-colliding ids for the things they coordinate over — overlapping occurrences, near-misses, folds. If each one writes its id straight onto a shared markdown page, the two writes collide at merge time and one id silently overwrites the other. The collision ledger removes that race: identity is allocated on an append-only issue thread, where GitHub serializes every comment and assigns a monotonic id, and the shared page is only ever a projection you rebuild from that thread.

This guide covers allocating an id at an anchor, rebuilding the ledger page and memory row from the anchor record, and verifying the projection still matches. It assumes the wiki is already set up — see Set Up Persistent Memory and Metrics.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 22+
• A wiki already initialized in your project
• GITHUB_TOKEN or GH_TOKEN set, or a logged-in gh CLI — the ledger reads and writes an issue's comment thread over the GitHub API

How allocation stays collision-free

Allocation is publish-an-anchor, not write-the-page. An anchor is one append-only comment on a coordination issue carrying a small fenced block:

kind: occ
ids: ["#97", "#98"]
event: 7d0f8bca
note: dual-execution episode

The durable key is event — a commit SHA or a prior anchor id. The ids are display labels only, so relabeling later is lossless. Because GitHub assigns each comment a monotonic id, the comment order is an allocation order no merge can erase: when two sessions race for the same label, the lowest comment id wins, first-published-wins. Nothing is written to the ledger page at allocation time, so the contested page never participates in the race.

Each anchor has one of four kinds:

Kind	Used for
occ	An overlapping occurrence.
nm	A near-miss.
fold	A fold of prior allocations.
meta	A meta-level allocation.

Allocating an id

Mint the next free id of a kind, keyed to a durable event:

npx fit-wiki ledger allocate --kind occ --event 7d0f8bca --note "dual-execution episode"

#97

The command prints the provisional id it minted. To allocate several at once:

npx fit-wiki ledger allocate --kind occ --count 2 --event 7d0f8bca

#97 #98

The printed ids are provisional. A later rebuild over the published comment sequence is authoritative — it resolves any concurrent interleave first-published-wins, so two racing allocations never keep the same label.

Backfilling an id that predates the ledger

For ids that already exist in history but were never anchored, register them explicitly instead of minting new ones:

npx fit-wiki ledger allocate --kind occ --ids "#42,#43" --event a1b2c3d4

If any named id already has an anchor, the command refuses rather than double-registering it.

Allocation options

Flag	Required	Description
--kind	Yes	occ, nm, fold, or meta.
--event	Yes	Durable key for the allocation — a SHA or a prior anchor id.
--count	No	How many ids to mint (default 1).
--ids	No	Comma-separated ids to backfill, instead of --count.
--note	No	Free-text note recorded on the anchor.
--issue	No	Anchor issue number (defaults to the coordination issue).

Rebuilding the projection

The ledger page and the memory row are projections of the anchor record. After new anchors are published, rebuild them from the authoritative thread:

npx fit-wiki ledger rebuild

rebuilt: 12 ids, 0 double-allocation(s)

rebuild reads the full anchor sequence, folds it (resolving any double allocation first-published-wins), and writes the result to the ledger page and the memory row, preserving any prose you have written against an anchor. If the prose cites an anchor that no longer exists, the command warns:

warning: prose cites missing anchors: #44

By default, a double-allocation loser is renumbered. To render it as a gap instead — keeping the original numbering visible — pass --gapped.

Verify

Confirm the projection matches the anchor record without writing anything:

npx fit-wiki ledger verify

verify: clean

verify re-projects the anchor record and compares it against the ledger page and the memory row. When they diverge it lists the problems and exits non-zero:

verify: ledger page diverges from the anchor record; MEMORY row diverges from the anchor record

The fix is to run rebuild, which re-projects both surfaces, then verify again to confirm they agree.

What's next