Same seed. Same company. Forever.
Determinism is not a feature here — it's the foundation. If the data can change between runs, every test built on it is a coin flip.
What a seed actually pins
A seed is a short string that reproduces an entire company: the same customers and vendors, the same invoices and payments down to the cent, the same identifiers, the same planted needles in the same places. Not “similar” data — byte-for-byte the same world.
The publish-ID handoff
Because a company is fully described by its seed, the entire thing is one shareable string. A PM builds and tunes a company in the dashboard; an engineer pulls the identical one locally:
fictix pull fix-7kq # the PM's exact company, locally
fictix deploy --env ci # identical endpoints in CI
fictix advance 30d # deterministic time travelOne ID moves a complete environment between people and stages with zero drift. The demo the AE saw is the company the SE debugs is the fixture CI runs.
Replay, partial regen, and variants
Replay reproduces a run exactly. Partial regeneration rebuilds just a ledger or a row range without disturbing the rest, so you can perturb one thing and hold everything else constant — a true controlled experiment. Variant runs derive a near-identical company that differs only in the dimension you're testing.
Why this kills flaky CI
Pin the seed in the pipeline and the only variable between two runs is your code. A red build means a real regression, every time — no retries, no quarantine, no “just run it again.”
Questions
Is a seed the same as an exported snapshot?
No. A snapshot is frozen output; a seed is the input that regenerates the whole living company — its API behaviour included — identically.
Does the same seed reproduce across machines and CI?
Yes. The same seed yields the identical company locally, in CI, and in a demo — that portability is the point.
Can I change one thing and keep the rest fixed?
Yes — partial regeneration and variant runs let you perturb a single ledger or dimension while everything else stays byte-identical.