Packages and self-modification

World changes itself through the same machinery it offers everyone else. Its behaviour lives in versioned AILANG packages, and the kernel stays deliberately small. Every proposed addition to the kernel or host has to answer "why is this not a package?" (coding standard S3).

Two kinds of publishing

There are two different publish operations. Do not confuse them.

	Transition registry publish	Package publish
Command	world-publish transitions	world-publish approve, then world-publish publish --live
Writes to	The local store's world/transition-registry/v1 head	The public AILANG package registry
Reversible	A later revision can replace a descriptor; history stays	No. A published version is immutable
Fences	Daemon stopped, controlling terminal, typed confirmation	Daemon not involved; controlling terminal, typed confirmation, a one-shot approval minted in a separate invocation, a golden ready-packet, a credential file
Runbook	QUICKSTART §6 and §9	docs/SELF_MOD_PUBLISH.md

Both are attended: an agent cannot complete either. See Attended steps.

world/core

packages/world-core/ is World's pure semantic core as an AILANG package: the modules world/types, world/contracts, world/transitions and world/logepoch. It declares no effects ([effects] max = []). It is a deterministic projection of the canonical sources, rebuilt with ./scripts/build_world_package.sh, never edited by hand.

• world/core@0.1.0 was published on 2026-09-21. That publish was clause 7's "controlled self-modification proven once".
• world/core@0.1.1 was published on 2026-10-02 (attended). It is proof hardening with no exported signature change: 16 contracts verified, 0 refuted.

Published versions are immutable. The next release needs a new candidate, a new golden ready-packet, and a new attended run.

se-tools

packages/se-tools/ holds the eight software-engineering transitions and their checked-in publish manifest, packages/se-tools/transitions.json. Each module is self-contained (module se_tools/read and so on, importing only std/*), exports main(input: string) -> string, and carries a contracted path predicate plus named inline tests. It is published into a store's transition registry with world-publish transitions, not to the public package registry.

The boundaries

Self-modification is scoped. These are out of scope and are never changed through World's own pipeline:

1. The mission-loop machinery (the shared driver and the mission-control skill).
2. The AILANG compiler. Language gaps found here are filed upstream in sunholo-data/ailang; World never forks or works around the compiler.
3. The live daemon binary. Replacing a running ailang-worldd is an attended operation.

Because worlds are immutable, rolling back a bad change is a roll forward: a new transition that re-pins the earlier version, with the failed episode kept as evidence.

What is not enforced

The world/ package namespace is a convention World enforces in its own gate, not registry namespace ownership. The registry currently authorizes publishers with a shared key that is not checked against the vendor prefix (tracked upstream as sunholo-data/ailang#633).