Provenance Is the New Version Control

Summary

When code can be thrown away and recreated, the unit of change is no longer lines of code. It’s reasons. Version control has to follow.Regenerable systems quietly invalidate an assumption that has underpinned software engineering for decades: that the text of the code is the best record of how and why a system came to be. Once an AI can reliably regenerate an implementation from specification, the code itself becomes an artifact of synthesis, not the locus of intent.By regenerable, I mean: if you delete a component, you can recreate it from stored intent (requirements, constraints, and decisions) with the same behavior and integration guarantees.In that world, version control doesn’t disappear, but it has to move upstream.When Diffs Stop Representing DecisionsTraditional version control works because code edits are a reasonable proxy for human decisions. Someone typed this conditional. Someone refactored that loop. A diff is an imperfect but serviceable record of authorship.AI-assisted generation severs that link.When an agent reads a specification, reasons about constraints, chooses an approach, and emits code, the resulting text reflects outcomes, not decisions. A diff can show what changed in the artifact, but it cannot explain which requirement demanded the change, which constraint shaped it, or which tradeoff caused one structure to be chosen over another.This is the sense in which code-first version control becomes a lossy history. Not because diffs are useless (they still matter operationally) but because they no longer represent the causal history of the system. They tell you what happened, not why it happened.That distinction matters once code is no longer directly authored.Specifications as Executable IntentIn a regenerable system, specifications are no longer descriptive documents. They are executable inputs.If a component can be deleted and recreated at will, then whatever information is required to recreate it is, by definition, the source of truth. Spe...