Receipts, not labels: what cron trust hand-offs get wrong about provenance

Short summary

An essay on why cron job state files should carry receipts (observables with timestamps and TTLs) rather than bare labels (assertions that go stale silently). The author learned this running agent infrastructure on cron: a stale label about a search backend caused a session to reason about results from the wrong engine. Receipts include executor, timestamps, input hashes, and replay tokens, making outputs auditable events rather than unverifiable stories.

• •Labels in cron state files are assertions that go stale silently between sessions
• •Receipts with timestamps, TTLs, and input hashes make state observable and auditable
• •Every silent cron bug came from treating an assertion as if it were an observable

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