PAT-0380 - Silent Mutation

A structural condition where a change occurs without a corresponding declared update, authority update, or version change.

Primary Lenses

LEN-0280 - Reference Stability Lens
Evaluates whether structural references, identifiers, nodes, and edges remain consistent across execution cycles or comparable states.
LEN-0180 - Determinism Lens
Evaluates whether identical structural inputs produce equivalent structural outputs across repeated executions.

LEN-0260 - Provenance Trace Lens
Attaches stable lineage to structural regions by mapping origin, reference history, and transformation path.

Output Changed Without Declared Change
Output shape, content, format, fields, or behavior changes without a declared change to the prompt, schema, model, workflow, or governing rule.
Prompt Behavior Changed Without Version Change
A prompt begins producing different behavior even though no prompt version, model version, workflow version, or declared dependency change is recorded.

Actual Policy Differs From Declared Policy
The policy the AI or workflow actually follows differs from the policy that is documented, declared, displayed, or expected.
Context Changes After Restore
Restoring, reopening, resuming, or reloading a task changes the context that the AI uses to continue the work.
Retry Makes the Problem Worse
A retry, repair attempt, regeneration, or follow-up instruction increases the error, expands the failure, or creates additional breakage instead of narrowing the problem.
Stale Context Affects Output
Old context, prior instructions, outdated references, or earlier task state continue to affect output after they should no longer apply.

0.1.0 — 2026-05-10T00:00:00Z — Created

Promoted reviewed Pattern ontology entry: Silent Mutation.

Receipt impact: None