Safety Invariants in Distributed AI Systems
This opening day of phase-4 establishes why safety properties must be explicit before scaling any AI engineering workload across nodes. It forces the learner to articulate invariants that later days will test under partitions and faults. The day matters because Maku's current rate-limiter and brief-generation paths will later need these guarantees to avoid silent data loss or inconsistent tribunal outputs.
Resources
- 25 min
- 20 minreadingO'ReillyDesigning Data-Intensive Applications chapter 8 excerpt on distributed systems
Safety and liveness properties
Deliverable
Journal entry of 300 words defining one safety property and naming the exact line in lib/rate-limiter.ts that could violate it
Quiz · 2 questions
1. Which property is violated when two replicas return different results for the same brief query under no network partition?
2. Give one concrete example of a safety violation that could occur in the current BriefForm submission flow.