CB-WP-0019-T05: what the meta budget is for, at 80/20

InnerLoop v1.7. The purpose is written first and the number follows from
it: most spend on the task at hand, some on control, review and
improving the process. make status prints it above the figure, because a
threshold with no stated purpose is what let this number be argued three
times.

Soft 20% over a trailing 5, and the self-test enforces that the ratio and
the window are a PAIR: META_SOFT_PCT == 100 / TRAILING_PASSES. One meta
pass among n at parity cost reads 1/n, so 80/20 is one pass in five at
normal cost -- a five-pass window. The same 20% over three would have
silently also demanded the meta pass be half-price, which makes meta work
rushed rather than rare. Moving the ratio without the window goes red.

The phase setting is declared, argued and expiring in gates.toml, and
reverts on review_by unless re-argued. Verified live at 35%. One with no
reason or no expiry is refused rather than honoured, because a threshold
anyone may move is not a threshold.

Measured: the last five passes read 7% against the new line.

InnerLoop.md crossed the 400-line limit three times while this was
written and was fixed structurally each time -- the arithmetic, the
cost-per-response basis and the two review case studies moved to
InnerLoopReference.md. The limit was not raised.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

specs/InnerLoop.md

@@ -6,12 +6,23 @@ a breach never blocks its own repair (D1/D2); loop work cashes out into
 something runnable in the pass that invents it (D4); the tier table
 covers changes to the loop's own operation (D5).
 
-> **Meta budget — soft, 25% of the trailing three passes.** Work on the
-> loop's own instruments and process is capped at a quarter of recent
-> spend. Measured by `make status` from each workplan's `kind:`
-> frontmatter (`product` | `meta` | `mixed`), over a **trailing 3-pass
-> window**; the lifetime figure is reported as history and is not the
-> metric (ADR-0006 D1).
+> **What the budget is for (v1.7, CB-WP-0019 T05).** Most of what this
+> project spends should go on **the task at hand**. Some of it must go on
+> **control, review, and improving the process that carries the work
+> forward** — a loop that never inspects itself accumulates exactly the
+> defects this one keeps finding, and a loop that only inspects itself
+> ships nothing. The budget names the split so that neither happens by
+> drift.
+>
+> **Meta budget — soft, 20% of the trailing five passes.** Measured by
+> `make status` from each workplan's `kind:` frontmatter (`product` |
+> `meta` | `mixed`), over a **trailing 5-pass window**; the lifetime
+> figure is reported as history and is not the metric (ADR-0006 D1).
+>
+> **The ratio and the window are a pair** — 20% over five is *one pass in
+> five at normal cost*; the same number over three would mean *one in five
+> and at half price*. `InnerLoopReference.md` §Meta budget has the
+> arithmetic.
 >
 > **Soft on purpose.** A task already started may be finished — stopping
 > mid-task to satisfy a ratio wastes the work and leaves the tree worse
@@ -27,6 +38,13 @@ covers changes to the loop's own operation (D5).
 >    `authorized_above_budget:` in the workplan frontmatter. Undocumented
 >    above-line meta work is a violation the evidence file must report.
 >
+> **The phase setting is not a dial.** The split may move for a phase, but
+> only **declared, argued, and expiring** — `meta_phase = { pct, reason,
+> review_by }` in `gates.toml`, reverting to 20 on `review_by` unless
+> re-argued. A setting with no reason or no expiry fails
+> `status.py --self-test`, so the line cannot be raised quietly to pass a
+> breach.
+>
 > A pass that exceeds it **says so in its evidence file and names the
 > product work displaced**. That is the whole enforcement: a reporting
 > budget, not a gate, for the same reason the session-shape budget is —
@@ -36,12 +54,8 @@ covers changes to the loop's own operation (D5).
 > least one executable check, command, or gate. Findings that stay prose
 > are recorded as findings and do **not** count as delivery.
 >
-> Measured basis: cost per response across five passes ran 0.123, 0.228,
-> 0.362, 0.298, 0.123 dollars, and the reading that survived the data is
-> that **cost tracks distance from a runnable check** — the passes that
-> shipped a command were cheap, the passes that argued about what a
-> number means were not (CB-EV-0007 §5). **Refuted if** a prose-only meta
-> pass lowers cost per response or catches a class no command could.
+> Measured basis and its falsifier: `InnerLoopReference.md` §Loop work
+> cashes out — **cost tracks distance from a runnable check**.
 
 > **Every gate is an experiment (v1.6, ADR-0006 D3).** Each standing
 > control gate has an entry in `gates.toml` naming what it has caught, a
@@ -194,20 +208,9 @@ sampling. So:
 > red. Re-running the command that prints a number satisfies "reproduce
 > independently" and finds nothing of this class.
 >
-> *(v1.4, from CB-WP-0005: `evidence/CB-EV-0001` reported `AM-7 replay |
-> met, 2,290×` for a clause that asserts nothing — the hash reaches only a
-> `println!`. The reviewer found it by opening a test out of curiosity and
-> said so; no systematic step pointed there. Mutating it settled it in one
-> command. This is the second verification step to inherit the author's
-> blindness — the first was CB-WP-0002's dedup sample — and both fixes
-> replace re-derivation with **adversarial execution**.)*
-
-*(v1.1, from CB-WP-0002: the dedup invariant was verified on the main
-transcript by the survey — 206/206 groups — and independently re-verified
-by the reviewer, who used the same transcript. It is false in the
-8-response `subagents/` tree neither examined. Two independent checks,
-one blind spot, because both sampled the same way. Only an assertion
-running over all the data at execution time caught it.)*
+*Both cases that produced these rules — CB-WP-0005's inert `AM-7 replay`
+clause and CB-WP-0002's same-sample dedup blind spot — are in
+`InnerLoopReference.md` §Why review is adversarial execution.*
 
 **What review demonstrably does do.** Measured across two passes:
 **$0.66** and **$1.11**, roughly 1% of each pass, each finding