Essay
Trust Decays, and Should
A relationship nobody has renewed in a year may not exist. A router that pretends otherwise is lying with old data.
Ask yourself how many people you could call today on the strength of a relationship from 2019. Some — the real ones. But your contact list does not know which, and neither does any network that treats a connection as permanent once made. Staleness is invisible in every professional graph, which means every professional graph silently overstates itself.
Magician makes decay a first-class rule. Every trust/1 edge carries a renewal clock. Fresh edges route at full strength. Aging edges route with their register capped. Stale edges — past a year unrenewed — still route, because a year-old relationship is a lead rather than a lie, but their contribution is downgraded to *estimated* and every path built on them says so.
The critical design decision, learned the hard way one level up in the estate: decay is derived, never accepted as input. There is no expiry field to write, and a document that carries one fails the parse. A caller who could set their own expiry could keep an edge artificially fresh without anyone re-checking the fact — the one way to defeat decay, closed at the format level.
Decay is also the kindest feature in the product. The router’s “stale edges worth renewing” view is a list of relationships that mattered enough to record and are quietly dying of neglect — which is exactly the list a good superconnector wishes they had at the start of every quarter.