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.
Secondary Lenses
- LEN-0260 - Provenance Trace Lens
Attaches stable lineage to structural regions by mapping origin, reference history, and transformation path.
Primary Issue Matches
- 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.
Supporting Issue Matches
- 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Old context, prior instructions, outdated references, or earlier task state continue to affect output after they should no longer apply.
Ontology Metadata
- Code
PAT-0380- Version
PAT-0380@0.1.0- Ontology release
- 0.1.0
- Updated
- 2026-05-10T00:00:00Z
History
-
0.1.0 — 2026-05-10T00:00:00Z — Created
Promoted reviewed Pattern ontology entry: Silent Mutation.
Receipt impact: None