Consistency Window

The span between a fact arriving and the store agreeing with it — during which the system actively believes something already contradicted.

Why it matters in a memory layer

It is the real price of deferred work, and it is not paid in compute. A store that converges to the right answer has a property nobody experiences, because the store is queried during the run.

Closing it does not require consolidating every turn. The window only opens when a turn claims a slot something live already claims, so gating on that runs consolidation on 11 turns instead of 25 for the same zero wrong answers. The gate needs no analysis of its own — slot_of is computed by the write path a moment later either way, and free is what lets a scheduler run on the critical path.

The failure mode to watch is a gate that half-works: pass the store after the turn's writes and a turn is contested by itself, taking 11 runs to 18 with identical output. A gate that fails completely shows up in a cost graph; one that half-fails reads as a gate that works.

Connections

Taught in: Sleep-Time Compute

Used in: Background Job Mechanics · The Failure Field Guide · Behaviour as Memory · The Latency Budget

Do not confuse with: Sleep-Time Compute