Design

The argument, the spec, and the comparisons. Long-form, opinionated, load-bearing.

• Treatise (long-form) When the Orchestrator Isn't Code — a treatise on agents that act. The thesis: when an LLM is the orchestrator, an agent that acts needs a journal underneath it. Forty-something pages; cites Lamport, Helland, Garcia-Molina & Salem.

• Rhythmic treatise The same argument in tighter, numbered prose. Read this if the long version is too long.

• Tape spec The design that turns the argument into a system. Protocol, primitives, reactor topology, replay semantics. The spec is the source of truth for what Tape promises.

• Event bus The WAL fan-out — how SubscribeEvents becomes Pub/Sub, webhooks, log sinks. The exactly-once-effective publisher (run_outbox_relay) with durable cursors.

• Parity matrix Tape vs. Temporal vs. LangGraph durable vs. Pydantic AI + DBOS. Feature-by-feature, honest about the gaps.

How to read these

If you've never seen Tape before:

1. Skim Why Tape exists (one page).
2. If the framing lands, read the Rhythmic treatise.
3. If you want the full argument with citations, read the long-form treatise.
4. The Tape spec is the contract — read it before you build anything you'll need to support.

If you're evaluating Tape against an alternative:

• The parity matrix names the trade-offs.
• The concepts / alternatives page has the TL;DR.

On the figures

The design docs are heavy on diagrams. They live in design-principles/ and are mirrored to tape/docs/design/ at site-build time by scripts/docs/gen_design.sh.

If you want the SVG sources, they're in the repo at design-principles/*.svg.