Idempotent, budget-bounded AI queries on a single SQLite writer

Ahnii!

northway is a Go service that turns approved sources into small, ranked, source-backed news feeds for AI agents — one process, embedded SQLite, deployed Pi-first. Every feed query that reaches an AI provider costs real money, and a network retry or a crashed request must never turn into a second charge for the same query. internal/sqlite is what makes that guarantee hold: one writer, scoped credentials, a reserve-then-settle budget, and an idempotent claim lifecycle for the provider call itself.

One writer, strictly locked

Store owns a single SQLite file and refuses to share it. Open takes an flock-style exclusive lock on the database file and requires the directory to be private:

if !info.IsDir() || info.Mode().Perm()&0077 != 0 {
    return nil, "", errors.New("database directory must be private (0700) and not a symlink")
}

Writes go through one *sql.DB with _txlock=immediate, and a buffered channel (writeGate) serializes callers before any transaction opens:

func (s *Store) write(ctx context.Context, fn func(*sqlc.Queries) error) error {
    select {
    case s.writeGate <- struct{}{}:
    case <-ctx.Done():
        return ctx.Err()
    }
    defer func() { <-s.writeGate }()
    tx, err := s.writer.BeginTx(ctx, nil)
    ...
}

Reads use a separate read-only pool (query_only(1)) with up to two connections, so lookups never queue behind the write gate. WAL mode, foreign_keys(1), and synchronous(FULL) are all asserted — not just set — by Ready(), which fails startup if the file’s actual pragmas don’t match what the binary expects.

Scoped keys, one cross-tenant lookup

Every credential is tenant-scoped. identity.go stores a key’s SHA-256 digest, never the key itself, and validates the full record shape before writing:

if key.TenantID != tenant || !identity.ValidKeyID(key.ID) || !key.Scopes.Valid() ||
    !validTimestamp(key.CreatedAt) || key.Digest == [32]byte{} ||
    key.LastUsedAt != nil || key.RevokedAt != nil {
    return errors.New("invalid key metadata")
}

LookupAPIKey is deliberately the only function in the package that resolves a key without an existing tenant scope — its own comment spells out the boundary: it “exposes no corpus data and is consumed only by identity.Service, never a public lookup endpoint.” Everything downstream of that lookup — TouchAPIKey, RevokeAPIKey, every query and mutation — takes a tenant and checks access before touching a row.

Reserve first, settle later

Budgets are tracked in micros (LimitMicros, SpentMicros, HeldMicros) and set through an operator-only call:

func (s *Store) SetBudget(ctx context.Context, principal identity.Principal, limitMicros int64) error {
    tenant, err := principal.RequireOperator()
    ...
}

The spend itself never just decrements a counter after the fact. A query first reserves a worst-case amount; only once the real cost is known does it settle the difference back. That two-step is what makes an in-flight AI call safe to retry, fail, or recover from a crash without double-billing.

The query claim lifecycle

BeginQuery is the entry point, and it’s built to be replay-safe. It hashes the caller’s idempotency key together with the endpoint (sha256("POST /v1/feed-queries\x00" + key)) and looks for existing work under that hash:

• Cache hit (same feed/corpus/entitlement/ranker revision as an existing snapshot) → returns the cached result, no budget touched.
• Existing work found, same request digest → returns the in-progress or completed claim; a second call with the same key can never start a second paid attempt.
• Existing work found, different request digest → ErrConflict. Reusing an idempotency key for a different request is rejected outright.
• No existing work, budget configured → reserves policy.WorstCaseMicros and returns a WorkID the caller can use to actually invoke the provider.
• No existing work, no budget → still creates work, but ProviderAllowed is false — the caller is limited to deterministic (non-AI) results.

The function’s own comment is blunt about the safety property: “A replay never returns WorkID, so it cannot authorize another call.”

From there, three methods carry a claim through its lifecycle:

StartProvider’s doc comment states the ordering guarantee directly: “An error/ambiguous commit never authorizes a call… No provider code runs inside storage.” The database transaction is the gate, not the HTTP call to the provider.

CompleteQuery re-checks the feed’s revision and each selected article’s content hash before it will settle spend or write a snapshot — an unrelated ingest arriving mid-request can’t get charged for or attached to a query that started against older data.

Recovering from crashes without guessing

Every claim carries a LeaseUntil. If a process dies mid-call, the spend is left in reserved or started, not silently lost or silently spent. RecoverQueries sweeps expired leases and fails them the same way FailQuery would — its comment notes it processes bounded batches and “preserves uncertain holds,” since an operator later needs to reconcile those, not assume they were free.

That reconciliation is ReconcileQuery, and it requires actual evidence, not elapsed time, before it will move a hold out of uncertain:

if w.SpendState == "settled" {
    if w.ActualMicros.Int64 == actualMicros {
        return nil
    }
    return query.ErrConflict
}
if w.SpendState != "uncertain" {
    return query.ErrConflict
}

Repeating the same settlement is a safe no-op; a contradictory number is rejected outright rather than silently overwritten.

Timestamps get the same suspicion

Money isn’t the only thing storage refuses to trust blindly. timestamps_test.go asserts that out-of-range values — before the epoch, past 9999-12-31, or offsets that push a boundary value across it — are rejected on write and never partially applied:

"positive wrap":    time.Date(600000, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC),
"offset past end":  time.Date(9999, 12, 31, 23, 0, 0, 0, time.FixedZone("west", -3600)),

A rejected write leaves the row, its version history, and its full-text index completely unchanged — the test checks the version count and search index directly, not just the returned error.

Why this shape

None of this is exotic SQLite usage — WAL mode, a single writer, a lease column. What makes it hold together is that every step that touches money or identity states its own precondition in code, not just in a comment: wrong state, expired lease, mismatched revision, or a reused key against a different request all fail the transaction outright. For a Raspberry Pi-deployed, single-process service fronting paid AI calls, that’s the difference between “retry-safe” as a claim and as a property you can point to in the diff.

Baamaapii