# Local-first source review — authority placement

Status: extracted; initial manual review, 2026-09-24, codex (self-review).
Source: SRC-0002, Kleppmann, Wiggins, van Hardenberg and McGranaghan,
[April 2019 web essay](https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/).
Conference DOI: 10.1145/3359591.3359737. The manual claims below predate the assisted investigation.

| Claim | Original locator | Source statement, paraphrased | Our interpretation |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| C01 | Seven ideals, paragraph 3 | The device's data copy becomes primary rather than subordinate to a server. | Local Authority differs from caching. |
| C02 | Ideal 3, paragraph beginning Since local-first applications | Local reading/writing can continue offline; synchronization follows connectivity. | Commit location and synchronization timing are separate decisions. |
| C03 | Introduction, paragraph beginning The software we are talking about | The discussion targets documents and personal repositories, excluding several centralized service domains. | Do not generalize the proposal to every transaction. |

C02/C03 were checked manually beyond the bench excerpt.

## Limits and counterexample

A hypothetical shared inventory reservation requires a separate concurrency argument;
local durability alone does not prove that a reservation is globally valid.
The excerpt does not establish a merge algorithm or access-revocation semantics.

## Disposition

Retain Local Authority as a hypothesis candidate. Review persistence, synchronization,
conflict handling and independent implementations before admission or maturity changes.


## Assisted packet review — 2026-09-25

`local-first-authority-06` completed through llm-connect. Its narrower packet yielded
no justified pattern candidates and no relations. Its C02 is an interpretive leap
from primary to authoritative, distinct from manual C02 above. Retain Local Authority
as a manual hypothesis; do not use the negative packet result to reject the broader
source or infer recurrence. See [diagnosis and review](../reviews/TruncationDiagnosis.md).


## Expanded evidence — 2026-09-25

[LocalFirstEvidenceExpansion](../reviews/LocalFirstEvidenceExpansion.md) adds located
storage/synchronization/conflict/recovery evidence and two documented application
uses. It supports a separate Conflict Copy candidate and distinguishes local-primary
storage from globally winning every merge. Earlier fragment-only negative findings
remain valid for their limited packets. Crash durability and runtime recovery remain
untested; this source review is still extracted rather than fully reviewed.