clay-borg/specs/InnerLoop.md

# The Inner Loop — Assimilate and Surpass

Status: **v0.1 draft** — becomes v1.0 only after surviving its first full
pass (CB-WP-0001-T09 retrospective).

Normative process for building every Clay-Borg capability. Referenced by
all workplans. The loop's own optimization target is **agentic efficiency**:
every artifact it produces must be small enough to load whole, structured
enough to act on without interpretation, and falsifiable enough that an
agent can judge its own work without a human in the iteration.

---

## The five steps

```text
1 RESEARCH  → research/CB-RES-NNNN-<slug>.md     (survey, baselines)
2 APPROVE   → decision recorded in the ADR        (gate: survey complete?)
3 DECIDE    → decisions/ADR-NNNN-<slug>.md        (assimilate/reimplement/hybrid)
4 SPECIFY   → specs/<Capability>.md               (contracts + acceptance metrics)
5 CODE LOOP → code + scenarios + benchmarks       (iterate until metrics beat baseline)
```

**Hard gate: no implementation code for a capability exists before its ADR
(step 3) is committed.** Steps 1–3 may be compressed into one session for
small capabilities, but their artifacts are never skipped.

### Step 1 — Research

Identify the best implementation in existence for this capability. Produce
`research/CB-RES-NNNN-<slug>.md` following the survey template (below).
The survey is done when it can name, per dimension, a concrete
**benchmark-to-beat**: a number, a property, or a reproducible comparison —
not an impression.

### Step 2 — Approve

An explicit recorded judgment inside the ADR: the survey is complete, the
candidates were the right ones, the baselines are trustworthy enough to
measure against. If not approvable, the loop returns to step 1 with the
named gap. Approval is cheap to record and expensive to skip — it is the
point where "we looked at X" becomes contestable.

### Step 3 — Decide

`decisions/ADR-NNNN-<slug>.md`: assimilate behind a port, reimplement, or
hybrid — with the **expected advantage stated per dimension** (see rubric).
An honest "worse here, better there, and why that trade is right" beats a
claimed sweep of all four dimensions.

### Step 4 — Specify

`specs/<Capability>.md`: the contracts, invariants, and — mandatory — the
**acceptance metrics table**, each row tied to a baseline from step 1.
A spec without measurable acceptance criteria is not done. Metrics follow
the conventions in [MetricsAndScenarios.md](MetricsAndScenarios.md),
including the rule that metric selection itself passes through a mini
research step (metric provenance).

### Step 5 — Code loop

Implement iteratively. Each iteration:

```text
change → cb-check (fmt, clippy, tests) → scenarios → benchmarks
       → compare against acceptance table → evidence row appended
```

Done when every acceptance metric meets or beats its baseline and the
comparison numbers are committed as an evidence file
(`evidence/CB-EV-NNNN-<slug>.md`). A failed scenario must yield a replay
artifact an agent can re-execute locally.

---

## The four-dimension rubric

Every survey, ADR, and acceptance table is organized by these dimensions:

| Dimension | Question | Example measurable proxies |
|---|---|---|
| **D1 Ease of specification** | How simply can behavior be stated, tested, understood? | rules-to-scenario coverage %, spec lines per rule, time-to-first-correct-scenario for a fresh agent session |
| **D2 Efficiency of implementation** | How cheap to build and keep building? | source LOC, dependency count/weight, clean-build and incremental-build time, tokens-per-completed-task |
| **D3 Speed of execution** | How fast does it run? | benchmark wall-time vs baseline, events/sec, memory footprint, determinism overhead |
| **D4 Optionality** | How cleanly does it integrate, extend, get replaced? | public API surface size, count of leaked foreign types (must be 0), effort-to-swap measured by null/reference impl existence, WIT-expressibility |

Scoring is always **relative to the step-1 baseline**, never absolute:
`better / parity / worse / unmeasured` per proxy, with the number attached.
`unmeasured` is legal in a survey, illegal in an evidence file.

---

## Survey template (research/CB-RES-NNNN-<slug>.md)

```markdown
# CB-RES-NNNN: <capability>
capability: <canonical.capability.id>
status: draft | approved

## Candidates
Per candidate: origin, license, maturity, adoption; data model; mutation
mechanism; determinism/replay story; relevant performance (measured if
runnable locally, cited with source otherwise).

## Baselines (benchmark-to-beat)
| Dimension | Baseline holder | Metric | Value | Provenance |
(one row minimum per dimension; provenance = measured / cited / estimated)

## Verdict
Which candidate leads per dimension; what none of them do well
(the surpass opportunity); risks in the baselines themselves.
```

---

## Agentic-efficiency requirements

The loop exists to be driven by agents. Therefore:

1. **Whole-file loadability** — every loop artifact stays under ~400 lines;
   split before exceeding, link with relative paths.
2. **Structured over prose** — tables and fenced blocks for anything a
   later step must parse (baselines, acceptance metrics, evidence rows).
3. **One command surface** — all checks runnable through repo-root
   commands (eventually `cb *`; until then, `make`/`cargo` aliases declared
   in one place), each supporting deterministic, greppable output.
4. **Self-contained tasks** — a workplan task names its input artifacts and
   output artifacts; a fresh session must be able to execute it from the
   task text plus linked files alone.
5. **Evidence or it didn't happen** — claims of "better" live in committed
   evidence files with numbers, never only in commit messages or chat.
6. **Token discipline** — per the global budget policy, a loop iteration
   that exceeds its budget without measurable progress is stopped and
   decomposed, not pushed through.

---

## Definition of done — one loop pass

A capability has completed the loop when all of the following are committed:

- [ ] research/CB-RES-NNNN with approved status and full baseline table
- [ ] decisions/ADR-NNNN with per-dimension expected advantage
- [ ] specs/<Capability>.md with acceptance-metrics table
- [ ] passing scenarios covering every numbered spec rule
- [ ] evidence/CB-EV-NNNN with final comparison vs baseline, no `unmeasured`
- [ ] retrospective note (may be one paragraph appended to the evidence
      file): what the loop itself should change
```