In practice, many distributed systems accumulate complexity because they treat state as something to negotiate with rather than something to enforce against. When systems attempt to reconcile past states in order to act in the present, they often generate retries, reconciliation logic, and coordination overhead just to stay consistent.

I’ve been experimenting with an enforcement-first pattern where every interaction is treated as a first-time request, invalid states are refused rather than repaired, and state is carried explicitly by the request itself. I put together a minimal reference implementation to make the idea concrete.

I’m curious where people think this model breaks down in practice, and which classes of systems truly require narrative state rather than local constraint enforcement.

https://github.com/SvengsFuture/stateless-substrate