Status: IN
Pipeline forward progress is architecturally enabled by control-data separation: the DAG control plane determines failure cascading and stage ordering independently of the mutable ctx dict data plane, allowing the forward-only design principle to skip failed branches without corrupting shared state — a concrete mechanism underlying the codebase's maximum-progress philosophy.
decoupling control (DAG) from data (ctx dict) is what makes forward-only failure handling safe in practice
Depends on (SL): video-pipeline-separates-control-from-data-flow, forward-only-design-prevents-regression-and-maximizes-progress