Paper

Local-first provenance and rollback for AI coding agents

A product-grade technical paper draft for agent-undo: problem framing, system design, artifact status, and a small measured evaluation from the current release build.

What it is

This paper treats agent-undo as a new infrastructure layer for agent-written code: not a replacement for Git, but a local provenance-and-rollback substrate for file writes that happen faster than commit cadence. It is written as design-and-artifact collateral for the product, not as venue-shaped academic cosplay.

Download PDF Paper source

Micro-evaluation

The paper now includes two artifact-level measurement passes from the current release build: a controlled synthetic repository and a repo-shaped snapshot of agent-undo itself, both reporting init time, write detection latency, rollback latency, and local store growth.

Synthetic repo

Release binary

4.85 MiB

`au init`

294 ms

Write detection

161 ms

`au oops --confirm`

8.4 ms

Object store

9.7 KiB

Timeline DB

60.0 KiB

Recorded events

Repo snapshot

Release binary

4.85 MiB

`au init`

565 ms

Write detection

167 ms

`au oops --confirm`

12.5 ms

Object store

480.4 KiB

Timeline DB

68.0 KiB

Files / events

97 / 102

Why keep this page

So the PDF has a stable home, the measurements have one public summary, and anyone curious about the technical depth can get to the writeup without turning the homepage into a paper launch page.