Single-Live-Environment (SLE): A Stigmergic, Zero-Rollback Architectural Paradigm for Production-Only Continuous Systems

[wAI ~ wErrors] «All models are wrong, but some are useful.» — George E. P. Box (1976) Single-Live-Environment (SLE) is a systems architecture proposal for collecting correctness evidence from live production inputs without granting unverified code direct authority over canonical state or irreversible external effects. The design removes the persistent staging environment as the primary semantic validation target and replaces environment promotion with capability promotion. Candidate code executes in capability-bounded ephemeral branches against immutable snapshots of live state. Proposed state changes remain non-canonical until a Commit Certificate succeeds. Irreversible effects such as payments, messages, remote API calls, or physical actuation are routed through a durable Side-Effect Escrow and cannot escape solely because candidate code requested them. Under explicit assumptions, rejection before state promotion/effect escape requires no destructive state rollback: the canonical pointer never moved and the external world was not mutated. Version 1.3 extends the architecture in five directions. First, it adds a graded Criticality Envelope with SHADOW, SUPERVISORY, and DIRECT authority modes and makes clear that high-consequence operational technology must retain independent domain-qualified safety kernels. Second, it provides a hypothetical application atlas ranging from one-person SaaS and AI agents to food/water logistics, municipal water, emergency resource allocation, space operations, and nuclear safety analytics. Third, it formalizes the organizational hypothesis of Human Stigmergy: status/release coordination becomes a queryable engineering ledger and reduced meeting time counts as a benefit only when rework, incidents, handoff quality, and unresolved architectural decisions do not worsen. Fourth, it develops Sovereign SLE Cells, frugal fault tolerance, cloud optionality, measured provider-exit time, and sovereignty-adjusted total cost. Fifth, it introduces a permissioned P2P/hybrid extension that separates observation, verification, coordination, and authoritative mutation. Cells may exchange signed evidence, health, artifact, and resource-intent packets while retaining local canonical truth and local effect authority; cloud/central compute may assist without becoming required for safe local survival. The preprint includes formal invariants, comparison tables, deployment profiles, live-shadow and effect-escrow models, concurrency/CAS rules, criticality/failure taxonomies, TLA+ blueprints, Wasm host-ABI constraints, PostgreSQL append-only/outbox references, P2P/hybrid guidance, decisive falsifiers, and a staged research program. Short description A production-only continuous-systems architecture in which live candidate code can observe real production entropy but must earn mutation authority through isolated branches, explicit evidence, commit certificates, and side-effect escrow; v1.3 adds criticality-gated use cases and permissioned P2P/hybrid federation. Selected related works / references Garcia-Molina, H.; Salem, K. (1987), Sagas, DOI 10.1145/38713.38742. Haas, A. et al. (2017), Bringing the Web up to Speed with WebAssembly, DOI 10.1145/3062341.3062363. Dorigo, M.; Bonabeau, E.; Theraulaz, G. (2000), Ant algorithms and stigmergy, DOI 10.1016/S0167-739X(00)00042-X. Heylighen, F. (2016), Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism I, DOI 10.1016/j.cogsys.2015.12.002. Nakajima, Y. (2026), The Log is the Agent, arXiv:2605.21997. S.V.E. Meta-License v5.0