Scope cut first, on the maintainer's decision after a spend review: the
project is 38% product / 62% loop-meta, cost per response is 2.9x worse
than its best window, and INTENT stage 0 still lacks a CLI player and
bots. CB-WP-0005 and CB-WP-0006 cost ~$74 — 31% of all spend — for zero
measured efficiency gain. T02 and T04 are cancelled unstarted.
T01: SH-1/SH-2/SH-3 now report over the window since the last commit, and
the cumulative figure is retained but labelled "history, NOT the metric".
The prediction held decisively — window 655,744 mean context against
cumulative 255,307, a 2.6x gap against a 20% refutation threshold. A
cumulative mean over 1,094 responses cannot detect a worsening trend
because the history outvotes the present.
T03: `make shape-budget`, modelled on CB-01/CB-02. Soft thresholds are the
existing SessionShape targets; hard is 1.5x, set before the next
measurement per §Step 4. Deliberately not in `make all` — failing the
build on context would block committing, and committing is what closes the
attribution window and is the natural point to compact, so a gate that
blocks the remedy is a trap. It fires HARD on its first run: 656,574
against a 300,000 ceiling.
InnerLoop v1.5 establishes the soft 25% meta budget. Workplans declare
kind: product|meta|mixed and `make status` reports the share; mixed splits
50/50 and says so. Soft on purpose — a task already started may be
finished, because stopping mid-task to satisfy a ratio wastes the work.
What it forbids is opening new meta work above the line. A pass that
exceeds it must say so in its evidence and name the product work
displaced.
First reading: 68% OVER, of $74.22 attributed. Product reads $0.00 because
the only product workplan, CB-WP-0001, predates qualified task ids and its
bare T## labels collide across passes — stated in the output rather than
papered over.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The loop has now survived CB-WP-0001 end to end and is revised from what
that pass actually taught, recorded in
history/260731-inner-loop-retrospective.md.
Held up: the adversarial review (one blocking and three significant
findings on its single use, resolved with new measurements rather than
argument), the parity-cap rule, the provisional U-item mechanism, and
the ADR gate.
The gap: both serious errors in the pass were measurement errors, and
the loop caught neither. Review reads prose; these were claims about
numbers. In both cases a harness ran successfully while doing no work —
a JS harness timing rejected no-ops, and a Rust benchmark computing
throughput for rounds that never completed.
v1.0 adds:
- Measurement validity: a harness must assert it performed the work it
reports. A number from a run that cannot prove it did the work is void.
- Metric feasibility: every metric names its instrument and is checked
reachable against the contracts in its own spec.
- No silently-ignored input; decisions get commands, not defaults;
scaffolds are exercised or marked; coverage gates that count tags say
so.
- Evidence must state what a comparison does not support.
- The chaos roll is recorded even when it changes nothing, so a
mechanism that never fires is visible rather than assumed.
CB-WP-0001 is complete: 9/9 tasks done.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
evidence/CB-EV-0001-game-kernel.md records the acceptance run against
the CB-RES-0001 baseline.
Met: AM-1 rule coverage 58/58; AM-6 throughput 1.65M events/s against a
100k target; AM-7 scaling 1.08x at 20x workload and a 100k-event replay
in 4.13ms against a 5s budget; AM-8 zero divergence over 10 full runs
with fmt and clippy clean; AM-10 zero foreign collection types.
Not met and reported as such: AM-4 at 33 transitive crates against a
<=20 target. Attribution is in the evidence file. The recommended fix
is making serde_yaml optional (-5, a test-only concern), after which
the remainder is sha2 and rand_chacha, which K5 and K7 require. We are
not hand-rolling crypto primitives to win a dependency count.
AM-12 is recorded as uncomputable: per-task token counts were never
instrumented, and inventing a USD figure would defeat the metric.
A measurement error was found and corrected before publication. The
first benchmark reported 9.3M events/s on a flat curve. The workload
had a player selecting SUPPORT while parked at Stress 4, so GR-R03
rejected it, rounds never completed, and throughput was computed for
rounds that never happened. The bench now asserts the per-round event
count and panics rather than measuring a stalled loop. The corrected
figure is 5.6x lower.
The evidence file states plainly what the boardgame.io comparison does
and does not support: the ~450x command-rate ratio is cross-runtime and
cross-feature-set, so it is a direction, not a verdict, per the
InnerLoop parity-cap rule.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
