Whole-file transport and repeated text patches can inflate payloads, overwrite concurrent work, and apply against stale structure.
Bounded semantic operations with structural and hash preconditions can reduce transport and stale edits without reducing correctness.
Represent a Change Intent Graph over semantic regions and apply AST-aware operations such as bounded replacement, symbol rename, and structural insertion in an atomic transaction with rollback and concise receipts.
- Every mutation names bounded semantic write regions.
- Hash or structural preconditions reject stale edits before mutation.
- A transaction either applies all operations or restores the prior state.
- Receipts identify changed regions without retransmitting whole files.
The hypothesis should be weakened or rejected if a comparable baseline passes the same correctness gate and this mechanism provides no repeatable benefit, or if the mechanism introduces safety/correctness failures that bounded revisions do not resolve. Negative results remain in experiments/.
Language adapters, conflict semantics, anchor durability measurements, and controlled comparisons with patch and whole-file editing.