Determinism

Criterion

Given the same input and state, a tool produces the same output: stable field names, stable ordering, and no incidental noise such as timestamps or random identifiers in default output.

Rationale

Determinism keeps output comparable and cacheable. An agent that compares two runs, or a CI job that snapshots output, depends on the same result encoded the same way every time.

Testable assertions

• determinism.repeatable (required): running the same read command twice with --json produces byte-identical output.
• determinism.stable-sort (recommended): a list command returns rows in the same order across runs.