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+---
+status: open
+opened: 2026-09-02
+located-in: [mesh-host]
+fixed-by:
+amended-design:
+---
+
+# 031 — A machine becomes each thing it was told, in turn
+
+## Symptom
+
+A machine that was pushed several declarations in quick succession applies every one of them,
+oldest first, at the better part of a minute each. Under the lab's suite — twenty-odd pushes in
+fifteen minutes — the anchor machine ran minutes behind the newest declaration, and a test that
+waited for it honestly timed out while the machine was busy becoming things nobody wanted any
+more.
+
+Only visible since caught-up became an equality: each report now names the declaration it applied,
+and the reports arriving were about ever-older ones. Before that, the same backlog hid inside
+timestamp comparisons that happened to pass.
+
+## Why it is wrong, and why it is also right
+
+Each declaration is complete — the whole machine, not a delta — so applying an old one is never
+*incorrect*, only wasted: the machine converges to a state the mesh has already moved past, then
+does it again. The queue keeps a disconnected machine's instructions safe, which is right. What
+is wrong is only the order of consumption: **a machine asked to be five successive things should
+become the last one.**
+
+## The shape of a fix
+
+On waking with a queue, drain it and apply only the newest declaration; acknowledge the
+superseded ones without applying them. Whether a superseded declaration deserves a report — and
+what its outcome should be called — is the real question for the link's vocabulary: silence reads
+as a machine that ignored an instruction, and "applied" would be a lie.
+
+## What it costs today
+
+Nothing on a real mesh at rest: pushes are far apart. It costs the lab about a doubling of one
+test's wait, and it will cost a real mesh exactly when things are busiest — a flurry of changes is
+when a machine can least afford to replay history.