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How Anchorline works
Anchorline works by recording actions over time and deriving the current state from those actions.
Instead of editing values directly, you describe what happened. Anchorline keeps those descriptions in order and uses them to calculate where things stand now.
This makes the system predictable. If you understand the sequence of actions, you understand the result.
Everything starts with a log
A log is a timeline for a specific purpose.
You create a log when you want to track something over time, such as money in an account or items in a collection. Each log is independent and focused on a single domain.
Once created, a log is never edited directly. All changes happen through actions recorded on the log.
Actions become events
When something happens, you record an action.
An action might be adding money, moving money, creating an item, updating an item, or correcting a previous mistake. Each action is recorded as an event and added to the log's timeline.
Events are ordered. The order matters because later events build on earlier ones.
State is derived, not stored
Anchorline does not treat the current state as something you manually maintain.
The current state of a log is calculated from its events. If you replay the timeline from the beginning, you always arrive at the same result.
This means there is no separate "history" view and "current" view. They are two ways of looking at the same data.
Corrections move forward, not backward
When something is wrong, you do not undo the past.
Instead, you record the correcting action. For example, if money was added incorrectly, you record an adjustment that brings things back into balance.
This keeps the timeline honest while still allowing you to move forward confidently.
Different logs, same mechanics
Balanced logs and collection logs work the same way under the hood.
They both use logs, events, and derived state. The difference is what the events represent and how the state is interpreted.
Because the mechanics are shared, logs can be organized, linked, and combined without introducing special cases.
What this enables
This model makes it easier to answer questions like:
- What changed?
- When did it change?
- What caused the current state?
- How did we get here?
Once you understand how Anchorline works at this level, the rest of the system follows naturally.
The next sections break down the individual concepts in more detail and show how to use them in practice.