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Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic
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A drive you can hand to an agent

· 3 min read
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic

A problem every team deploying AI agents hits early: you want an agent to read one folder of documents — not your whole drive, not forever, and revocably. With Convex 0.8.8, DLFS drives can be shared exactly that way: a signed capability naming a DID URL like did:key:z6Mk<alice>/dlfs/docs, delegatable in chains, attenuated at every hop, verified against any DID method — and no central account system anywhere.

Garbage collecting an immutable universe

· 3 min read
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic

For years, a comment in EtchStore.java read: "Garbage collection is left as an exercise for the reader." We're finally doing the exercise. Coming in Convex 0.8.9: online garbage collection for Etch — reclaiming space from a content-addressed, append-only store while the peer keeps running, with crash-safe recovery and fully lock-free reads.

Byte surgery on the CVM

· 3 min read
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic

Convex 0.8.8 adds two small core functions with outsized reach: cat concatenates raw bytes, and splice overwrites bytes at a position. On most platforms these would be mundane. On the CVM, values are immutable Merkle trees with structural sharing — so you can patch a few bytes in the middle of a multi-megabyte Blob for the cost of the patch, not the Blob.

Networks that evolve

· 3 min read
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic

Convex 0.8.7 ships something most decentralised networks still handle out-of-band with flag days and coordinated restarts: protocol upgrades scheduled on-chain, activating at a precise instant in consensus time, with the network's identity — its genesis hash — untouched. No hard fork, no new chain.

Kafka on the lattice

· 3 min read
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic

Distributed systems run on two fundamental shapes of data: state and logs. The lattice already handles state — the KV Database gives you shared mutable maps that merge and converge. The Lattice Queue now covers the other half: ordered, durable streams of events with Kafka-style semantics — topics, partitions, offsets, independent consumers — but with no broker cluster anywhere.

Hardening UCAN

· 7 min read
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic

Convex 0.8.6 closes three authentication and merge-path weaknesses in the lattice's capability layer. Two of them were genuine bypasses in how UCAN tokens are verified and how capabilities are matched; the third turns a merge over untrusted data from a potential denial of service into a safe no-op. None of them are exotic — they are the kind of boundary bugs that hide in any authorisation system — and the fixes are worth writing down because the shape of each mistake is instructive.

Mount your decentralised drive

· 3 min read
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic

DLFS stores an entire filesystem as one immutable, content-addressed, mergeable lattice value — which counts for little if you can't reach it with the tools you already use. Convex 0.8.4 fixes the access problem three ways at once: DLFS drives are now reachable through the Java NIO API, through WebDAV (including your OS file manager), and through MCP tools for AI agents. One drive, three doors.

A social network that nobody hosts

· 3 min read
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic

Convex 0.8.3 includes a new module that we think demonstrates the lattice better than any benchmark: convex-social, a peer-to-peer social network framework where each user owns a cryptographically signed feed that only they can write to, replication follows follow relationships, and timelines are computed — not served — by merging the feeds you care about. There is no server. There is nothing to host.

Exabyte sparse files

· 8 min read
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic

DLFS — the Decentralised Lattice File System — now supports sparse files up to 9.2 exabytes (Long.MAX_VALUE bytes). Creating one is instant. Writing a single byte into the middle takes microseconds. Here's how we made that work with a handful of elegant tricks in Convex's immutable data layer.

Building SQL on a lattice

· 6 min read
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation

I've been exploring an interesting question: can you build a proper SQL database on top of lattice data structures? Not a thin wrapper, but something that actually understands both worlds — SQL semantics and CRDT-style merge operations.

Turns out you can. Here's what I learned.

Cursors: mutating the immutable

· 3 min read
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic

Immutable data is wonderful right up until your application needs to do something. Convex 0.8.2 ships Lattice Cursors — a thin, atomic, mutable layer over immutable lattice values that gives applications a familiar "read it, change it, write it back" model without giving up the guarantees of the immutable values underneath.

JSON is a subset of the lattice

· 3 min read
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic

Convex 0.8.1 ships a JSON parser (with a proper ANTLR grammar) for the lattice. The parser is the small part. The point is that we didn't have to build a JSON object model, because we already had one: every valid JSON document is already a CVM value. JSON is a strict subset of the data types Convex has had from the start.

Stake, delegate, earn

· 3 min read
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic

With Protonet live, Convex 0.8.0 switched on something the network's economics have been designed around from the start: automatic reward distribution to peers and delegated stakers, computed and paid entirely in consensus. No claiming transactions, no reward contracts to poke, no operator scripts — participation itself is the payout mechanism.

One contract, a million markets

· 3 min read
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic

Convex 0.7.11 introduces scoped actors: instead of calling an actor by its address alone, you can call it as [#1234 :USD] — an address plus a scope value the actor interprets however it likes. One deployed contract can now serve an unbounded family of assets, markets or resources, each addressed as a first-class value.

Integers that don't overflow

· 3 min read
Mike Anderson
Hacker, Convex Foundation
Claude
AI Assistant, Anthropic

Convex 0.7.10 starts landing arbitrary-precision integers, native in the CVM. Multiply two enormous numbers and you get the right answer. Not a wrapped answer, not a reverted transaction, not a number shaved to fit a 256-bit word. The right answer.