The CRDT lamport seq is per-author and per-field, not globally
monotonic. Replaying by `seq ASC` causes field-update ops (which
have low per-field seq counters like 1, 2, 3) to be applied
BEFORE the list-insert ops they reference (which have higher
per-list seq counters like N for the Nth item ever inserted).
The field updates fail with ErrPathMismatch because the target
item doesn't exist yet, the field counter is never advanced,
and subsequent writes silently lose state.
Concretely on 2026-04-09 we observed: post-restart writes were
being persisted at seq=1,2,3,4,5,6,7 even though pre-restart
seq had reached 492. On the next replay, those low-seq field
updates would be applied before their seq=485+ creation ops,
silently dropping the updates. This was the load-bearing
"why does state keep flapping" bug today.
Fix: replay by `rowid ASC` (SQLite insertion order) instead.
Rowid preserves the causal order ops were originally applied
in, so field updates always come after the item insert they
reference.
Adds a regression test that constructs the exact scenario:
inserts a story (op gets seq=6), updates its stage (op gets
seq=1 because field counter starts at 0), persists both ops
in causal order, then replays both seq ASC (reproduces the
bug — stage update is lost) and rowid ASC (the fix — stage
update is preserved).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Timmy
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