WHY LOAMS FIRST?
Research systems need durable information beneath replaceable compute. Loams starts with that substrate; a working substrate does not validate TC-H.
DIRECTIONAL HORIZON / NOT A ROADMAP / NOT TC-H EVIDENCE
Durable information substrate → intelligence systems → autonomous research → robotic experiments → manufacturing → energy throughput → physical reach.
Each transition requires its own engineering, resources, and validation. This sequence describes an ambition, not a delivery commitment.
WHY DURABILITY MATTERS TO AUTONOMOUS RESEARCH
Ephemeral reasoning without durable state can mean repeated rediscovery: prior hypotheses, discarded approaches, and artifacts disappear with the compute that produced them.
Provider-locked memory creates dependency risk. Non-reproducible state weakens evidence because another researcher cannot reconstruct the conditions behind a result.
Durable, portable state is intended to make research reusable: preserve history, retrieve artifacts, reproduce a run, and replace a provider without surrendering the record. These are engineering requirements to test, not capabilities established by this explanation.
Correctability needs inspectable history. Exit needs portable state. Reproducibility needs identifiable inputs and artifacts. Loams connects those requirements at the infrastructure layer; increasingly autonomous research remains a directional horizon.
DESIGN INVARIANTS
- Open formats: Data stored as Lance, Tantivy, Iceberg; survives any proprietary serving layer.
- S3-compatible API: Any object store provider can be substituted without application code changes.
- Stateless compute: Query nodes reconstruct hot tiers from object storage; no compute node holds authoritative state.
PRE-REGISTERED CONDITIONS
- Correctness
- CI-1: Read-your-own-writes (RYW) guaranteed for any client carrying its write consistency token under all single-node and cluster partition failure modes up to quorum failure.
- Performance kill condition
- PM-1: The consistency token model cannot achieve read-your-own-writes within 50 ms p99 of the write returning for standard reference workload without full Lance/Tantivy materialization. Threshold: 50 ms p99.
- Exit kill condition
- L1-V1: Applications using Loams fail the conformance suite pinned to commit c2f7ea4dabba0ddd35512cec239cb51f1eaa5326, OR exporting collection data followed by native serving requires rewriting >10% of code.
- Cold-start kill condition
- L1-SLO: First query against a cold namespace (>30 days inactive) exceeds 1,500 ms p99.
- Success conditions
- Formal verification of RYW correctness plus independent benchmark confirming ≤ 50 ms p99. Conformance suite passes with independent verification and ≥ 3 documented zero-rewrite migrations.
MATURITY
Available in CI
- Collections
- Hybrid retrieval (vector + BM25 + RRF)
- Native REST API
- Arrow Flight SQL
- Qdrant REST + gRPC compatibility (client 1.15 & 1.19)
- Elasticsearch subset compatibility (client 8.19)
- Streams + links
- Hot tier caching
- Cluster mode
- TiKV metastore (opt-in)
- Loams Durable / Resonate execution (opt-in, SQLite)
In progress
- Durable store on TiKV
- Loams Live reactive state
- Postgres / MySQL wire protocol support
- Streaming gRPC
- Web research console
Planned
- Graph expansion (GraphRAG)
- Iceberg table analytics
- Kafka wire protocol / OTLP ingestion
- Multi-tenant auth & isolation
- Python SDK + MCP server
- Serverless function sandboxes
- GitOps Helm charts
LEDGER PROVENANCE
CI-1, PM-1 (50 ms), L1-V1 (pinned commit c2f7ea4), and L1-SLO (1,500 ms) thresholds committed. Advancement past "Artifact reused" blocked while Adversarial Ledger Reviewer role is vacant (STATUS: BOOTSTRAP).
PROVISIONAL UNTIL THE FOLLOWING CONDITION IS MET:
Conformance suite passes with pinned commit c2f7ea4 and independent benchmark confirms consistency-token latency ≤ 50 ms p99.