swaitsandClaude Opus 5.5
3609bf065e
The money arithmetic every invariant rests on now lives in one kernel,
ledger-core/src/kernel.rs: signing a line, totals, net, per-account
movements, reversal, normal balances, trial-balance columns, closing
lines, and the rounding plug for member splits. It is generic over a
checked `Amount` trait. The engine runs it on Decimal (validate,
movements, reverse_entry, account_balance, close_period_to, allocate,
trial_balance): there is one copy of the arithmetic, and it is the one
under proof.
Three layers, docs/verification.md maps every law to its proofs:
- Kani (src/proofs.rs): 17 harnesses prove the kernel at i64 for every
input up to 4 lines over 3 accounts. An entry is accepted exactly
when it is two or more positive, in-range lines whose debits equal
credits; accepted entries net to zero; grouping by account loses
nothing; a reversal mirrors and cancels its original; trial-balance
columns balance iff the books net to zero; closing lines zero their
accounts and a close balances however the net is split; the plug
makes parts sum to the whole. No panics, no overflow. kani::cover!
shows the proofs are not vacuous.
- Lean 4 (verify/lean): 24 headline theorems for books of any size. The
ledger is a state machine (add account, draft, post, reverse, open,
close), and in every reachable state the books net to zero, the trial
balance balances (as of any date), and the accounting equation holds.
Posting only appends ("posted is forever"), closed periods are
frozen, a close zeroes revenue and expenses and credits exactly the net
income, and period statements add up. Audit.lean shows standard axioms
only, no sorry.
- Bridge (tests/kernel_bridge.rs): the Decimal and i64 kernels agree.
What the proofs found (each one missed by every test, fuzzer, and
mutant):
- The engine accepted negative line amounts; only MCP refused them. Now
NegativeAmountLine: direction is the side's job.
- Summing lines near Decimal::MAX panicked. Lines are now capped at one
quadrillion and ten decimal places (AmountOutOfRange), which keeps
every realistic sum exact, and the kernel's sums are checked.
- FX conversion (foreign_amount * fx_rate) could panic the same way; it
is now a checked multiply.
- Kani itself: 0.68 mis-models symbolic-length copy_from_slice
(model-checking/kani#4904) and reported a reversal that doesn't net to
zero. The counterexample, replayed natively, passes, and a 15-line
standalone crate reproduces the bug. Harnesses avoid bulk copies, and
a should_panic canary will flag the upstream fix.
`just prove` runs it all (Kani memory- and time-capped, fails on an
unsatisfiable cover or a non-standard Lean axiom). AGENTS.md now makes
formal coverage part of every core change.
Also, docs: GnuCash is *an* oracle, never *the* oracle (Stephen). The
spec is accounting principles, proved. Golden files are recomputed from
principles. External implementations (GnuCash, the old Sheet, QBO/Xero)
are cross-checks whose disagreements get adjudicated, never obeyed.
docs/oracle.md gains "Who is right"; AGENTS, README, architecture,
roadmap, parity, and STATUS are reworded to match.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GWVo7x3UHw5kwCUaWxiejX
112 lines
6.1 KiB
Markdown
112 lines
6.1 KiB
Markdown
# The semantic oracle: how we prove the books are right
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storytold's clones are verified with a *pixel oracle*: re-render a PSD and
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diff it against Photoshop's own embedded merged composite, passing at
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≤ 2/255 per channel. We steal the shape of that idea and change the domain:
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our oracle is *semantic*, not visual.
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## The core loop
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1. **Fixture books.** A canonical set of journal entries exercising a feature
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(the January 2026 fixture company in `tests/invariants.rs` is the first).
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2. **More than one engine.** The same fixtures go through our engine and
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through independent implementations: **GnuCash** (open source, open file
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formats), the old Google Sheet, and later QBO/Xero exports. These are
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*cross-checks*, not authorities (see "Who is right" below).
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3. **Exact diff.** `reports::snapshot()` renders trial balance, P&L, and
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balance sheet as canonical JSON. The outputs must be **identical** —
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decimal strings, no floats, no locale, no epsilon. Where storytold allows
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2/255 of perceptual slop, we allow zero: accounting has no "close enough".
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## Who is right
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No other program is the spec. GnuCash, the Sheet, QuickBooks: each is
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*an* oracle, and each can be wrong. The order of authority:
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1. **Accounting principles, stated as proofs.** The laws in
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`docs/verification.md`, proved in Lean and model-checked by Kani. They
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do not depend on any other implementation's behavior.
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2. **Golden files recomputed by hand** from those principles (Layer 1).
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3. **External oracles** (GnuCash, the Sheet, QBO/Xero exports). A
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disagreement with one is a *finding*: work out from principles which
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side is wrong and write the reasoning down. Never change our output just
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to match theirs. If theirs is wrong, add a test that pins our correct
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behavior, and note their bug in `docs/parity.md`.
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Nothing in this repo may rest on an external oracle's behavior alone.
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## The oracle layers (today → future)
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**Layer 1 — Golden files (live now).** `tests/golden/*.json` hold
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hand-verified expected reports for canonical fixtures. The golden test fails
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on any behavior change, intentional or not. Intentional changes require
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recomputing the goldens *by hand from accounting principles* and documenting
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the recomputation in the commit. This is the seed of everything below.
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**Layer 2 — Property tests (live now, growing).**
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`crates/ledger-core/tests/properties.rs` uses `proptest` (with shrinking)
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to assert the accounting laws over hundreds of random inputs: trial balance
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always balances, the accounting equation holds, reversals restore zero,
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posted entries are immutable and JSON-round-trip clean, and depreciation
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schedules are exact to the penny. This layer caught a real bug on its second
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case: partial first/final months in different-length calendar months don't
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complement, so the lifetime total drifted by cents (fixed with the
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final-month true-up in `depreciation_schedule`).
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**Layer 3 — Mutation testing (live now).** `cargo mutants -p ledger-core`
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(228 mutants as of 2026-10-10: 159 caught, 28 unviable, 2 timeouts from
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induced infinite loops, 39 missed). Every *missed* mutant is triaged:
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real gaps get new tests (this pass added parent-account validation,
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wrong-typed asset links, zero-proceeds disposal, two-asset ids, 1-month
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life, `Money` arithmetic, `is_balance_sheet`, `movements()`), equivalent
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mutants are documented as such (e.g. `days_held > 0` vs `>=`: the zero
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case is unreachable), and untestable-by-construction mutants are noted
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(e.g. `TrialBalance::balanced -> true`: the engine cannot produce an
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unbalanced ledger to falsify it).
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**Layer 4 — Fuzzing (live now).** `cargo fuzz` targets in `fuzz/`
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(nightly, libfuzzer): `fuzz_journal_line` (journal parsing never panics;
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canonical form is a fixed point), `fuzz_entry_validate` (a validated entry
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always balances exactly), `fuzz_op_sequence` (arbitrary op sequences via
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`arbitrary`; the trial balance always balances). 11.5M execs, zero crashes
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as of 2026-10-10. Corpora persist in `fuzz/corpus/` for regression.
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**Layer 4½ — Formal proofs (live now).** The accounting arithmetic lives
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in one generic kernel (`kernel.rs`). Kani model-checks it exhaustively
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within bounds, Lean 4 proves the laws for books of any size (trial
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balance, accounting equation, reversals, posted-is-forever, frozen closed
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periods, closing to net income), and a property test bridges the two.
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`just prove`; see `docs/verification.md`. Its first pass found three
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engine bugs that Layers 1–4 had all missed.
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**Layer 5 — Cross-implementation diff harness (roadmap phase 3).** A
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`ledger-oracle` crate will run fixture books through our engine and through
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other implementations (GnuCash headless first), then diff `snapshot()`
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output automatically: `cargo xtask oracle`. This is the direct analog of
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storytold's `cargo xtask corpus` / `oracle_diff`, with one difference: a
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diff does not mean we are wrong. Each one is adjudicated from principles
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(see "Who is right"). Note also: GnuCash is *a* behavioral cross-check, not
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a file-format target
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(Stephen: "for file format import/export I could not give a single shit
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about GnuCash XML — QBO is all that matters"). The harness feeds fixtures to
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GnuCash via whatever it imports reliably (QIF/OFX) or its Python bindings;
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the exact mechanism is decided at implementation time. The proofs and
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Layers 1–4 are the foundation and are not optional. The harness adds
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evidence. It never overrides them.
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## What the oracle does NOT cover (yet)
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- **Workflows**, only semantics: that an invoice *posts the right lines* is
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oracle-covered; that the invoice *screen* is usable is a UI concern for the
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egui phase, where storytold's screenshot-in-the-loop comes back.
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- **Tax law.** The engine computes what you tell it; it does not know the
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tax code. Tax-adjacent logic gets its own fixtures and its own goldens
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when it arrives, sourced from IRS publications — never from memory.
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## Clean-room boundary
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GnuCash is GPL. We read its documentation, its file formats, and its
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*behavior*. We never copy its code, and no GPL code enters this repo
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(MIT OR Apache-2.0). If an agent is ever unsure whether something is
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"learning from behavior" vs "copying implementation", it stops and asks.
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