Clock Skew Quietly Breaks Agent Coordination Guarantees

Ordering, expiry, and timeout logic all assume agents agree on time, and small clock skew converts those guarantees into probabilities.

Two agents disagreeing by a few seconds sounds harmless until an approval expires on one machine while the other still honors it. Time is a dependency, and it drifts.

Where skew does damage

• Expiry checks that pass on the writer and fail on the reader.
• Audit timelines that order effects before their causes.
• Timeout races where both sides believe they acted in time.

Use the architecture guide, blackboard schema, and audit schema to remove wall-clock assumptions from ordering and expiry logic.