T03: InnerLoop v1.7 plus loop-lint's own-cost check. Six passes
under-reported themselves by 30-45%, never once high, and the rule lived
only in evidence files having been re-derived three times. The READING
is load bearing, not the boundary: CB-WP-0018 T04 applied 're-run the
instrument at the moment of quoting' alone and its figure was correct.
So the operative instruction is re-run when you quote, and loop-lint
fails an evidence file naming its own workplan beside a dollar amount
without marking it provisional.
It binds forward from this pass. The check fires on seven historical
files which ARE the evidence for the rule; making them comply would edit
the record to remove the thing it proves -- the same category error as a
live fact: tag on a dated measurement, which this pass also hit.
Lifecycle, at the maintainer's instruction: ready -> active -> done,
where ready means declared and not started. loop-lint fails a workplan
that has started and still says ready, one that is active with
everything closed, and one that is done with an open task. The first
version of that check was WRONG and its own self-test caught it: it
stripped the leading status: assuming frontmatter, which silently
dropped a real task once the frontmatter said ready or active.
Both new checks then fired on this pass's own artifacts and both were
right to.
T04: CB-EV-0017. The new meta budget's first reading is a breach it
caused -- 27% against the 20% line, because this pass cost $31.18
against product passes averaging ~$21. Reported rather than exempted:
ADR-0006 D2 covers the instrument repairs but not the rule-writing, and
the honest reading is that this should have been two passes.
CB-WP-0018 settled at $36.53/95 against $28.08/82 last reported, 30%
higher. Seven for seven.
make all exits 0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
T03: input::describe writes a sentence per legal command; data-descs
carries them in step with data-targets; the ghost already following the
pointer shows the one for whatever legal target is under it, so the
explanation lands beside the target with no overlay layer to keep
aligned. ADR-0010 D1 binds -- the page renders it, never composes it.
Both mutations INITIALLY SURVIVED because the fixture's Attack card had
exactly one target, where an off-by-one shift and a truncation are both
no-ops. CB-EV-0014's lesson one level in: a fixture too thin to express
a failure is how the failure survives. Two attack targets now, both red.
T04: chaos rate d4 -> d8, window 2 open at 12 declarations, retiring if
an override changes nothing twice running. Window 1's condition was NOT
met -- both overrides changed the outcome -- so the mechanism is kept.
The weakest part of the decision is that it is a rate change argued from
n=2, so window 2 carries a falsifier: no override at all is evidence the
rate went too far, not that the mechanism is healthy.
InnerLoop.md hit 401 lines and the loadability gate fired; the rationale
moved to InnerLoopReference.md, structurally, per the standing precedent
that limits are not raised.
CB-WP-0017 settled at $9.48/40 against $5.19/23 reported mid-flight,
83% higher. Six for six, always low -- read by re-running the instrument
at the moment of quoting, which is CB-EV-0015's correction applied for
the first time.
make all exits 0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
D2 the two exemptions — repairing the instrument that reports a breach
is always in budget, and the maintainer may authorize above-line work in
the workplan frontmatter. v1.5 had neither, and the first thing it did
was forbid fixing the budget's own defect.
D4 loop work cashes out into something runnable in the pass that invents
it, with the measured basis and the refutation condition stated.
D5 the tier table now triggers at M for changes to the loop's own
operation, closing the gap CB-RES-0005 §6 opened and this pass's own ADR
had to declare around.
The file went from 399 lines to 386: the chaos-roll calibration
rationale and the v1.0-v1.3 change log moved to InnerLoopReference.md.
Loadability is a gate too, and growing the file to fit a rule about
gates would have been the joke writing itself.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
T07 — CB-EV-0004. 70 responses, $16.03.
Test 1 MET: 1 spec -> 2, 58 rules -> 76, 1 source file -> 10, and the new
denominator came in at 83% naming K10/K14/K18. The stated failure mode — a
widened denominator reporting the same percentage — did not occur.
Test 2 UNMET: M-D1-MUT 4 of 14 against >=10, and wrong about what as well
as how much. The diagnosis was three absent kernel rules; the measurement
found eight rows with no instrument at all.
Test 3: quality held, and widening surfaced far more than the seven known
defects — six further uninstrumented rows, HDN #7 (rule-coverage's
self-test green while the tool was broken), a stale $248.46 invisible to
facts-check because it was untagged, and a fifth error class.
The clean test CB-WP-0004 was owed is now run, on a pass that used the
tools without building them. The two categories whose tools removed the
manual path are at 0 turns two passes on; the two that merely offered a
better option are now the entire mechanical cost of a pass. Absolute
mechanical cost fell $51.76 -> $6.13. The mechanism holds.
Reported because nothing else would: SH-3 batching is 0.0% this pass — 67
tool calls across 67 responses — against a 20% target, and mean context
315,170 against 200,000. SessionShape has stated these since CB-WP-0003
and none has ever been enforced.
T08 — the retrospective answers its question: yes, a weak mutation is the
new grep, and it is worse, because it fails in the opposite direction.
mutation-check's first run produced two SURVIVED verdicts and both were
the author's own no-op mutations.
The fifth error class: false accusation. HDN, TA, SSB and DFD all
under-report — a real problem passes. FA over-reports: it publishes the
claim that working code is broken, sends the next pass to fix something
that is not broken, and is more credible than the truth because it arrives
with a measurement attached. Thirteen instances, five classes, six passes,
and the newest class is one that hardening created.
One correction to CB-WP-0004 T06: "a gate only pays if it removes the
manual path" is a predictor of whether a gate saves money, not a criterion
for whether it is worth having. mutation-check fails that test and
produced the most valuable findings of the pass.
InnerLoop v1.4: where a claim rests on numbers, the adversarial reviewer
must read the assertion behind each quoted number and mutate it.
Re-running the command that prints a number is not verification of that
number. Second verification step to inherit the author's blindness; both
fixes replace re-derivation with adversarial execution.
CB-WP-0005 status -> done, 5 of 8 tasks, 3 cancelled into CB-WP-0006.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Duplicated-fact drift is the fourth error class and the only one with no
executable rule. No positive control catches it (both copies are
internally consistent) and re-derivation does not either (the copy
reproduces whatever it was copied from). It is caught only by reading a
copy against its source, which nothing in the loop required.
facts.toml holds 15 facts and is GENERATED by `make facts-gen` from
cb-cost, dep-weight and rule-coverage. The trap this task named — a
hand-maintained registry that becomes another drifting copy — is closed
by facts-check re-running the instruments and failing when the committed
registry disagrees with them. A stale registry cannot certify stale
artifacts.
An artifact quoting a fact tags it: **$93.15** <!-- fact --> with the key.
17 occurrences across 5 artifacts are now checked.
Falsified before being believed: changing CostAccounting.md line 158 from
$93.15 to $92.87 — the exact historical drift — produced exit 1 naming
the file, the line and the expected value. Tested against the class it
exists to catch, on a real artifact, not only in its self-test.
It then caught a live tag inside its own documentation example in
InnerLoop.md within the hour. Third time a gate has failed on its own
pass's work.
What it does not close is stated rather than implied: 22 untagged literal
copies remain and are reported, not failed. Tagging is opt-in, a number
can legitimately recur, and a gate that fires on coincidence gets routed
around. Naming the uncovered surface beats claiming the class is closed.
InnerLoop single-source-of-fact moves from prose to executable — v1.3.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The retrospective question was whether the mechanism set is complete or
each pass still finds a new class. This pass produced both an eighth
instance AND a fourth class, so the answer is the uncomfortable one.
Ledger: 10 instances, 4 classes, across 3 workplans. Every pass has
produced at least one class the previous pass had not seen.
HDN harness-does-nothing 5 executable assertions
TA trusted arithmetic 3 re-derivation
SSB same-sample blind spot 1 assertions over ALL the data
DFD duplicated-fact drift 2 NEW -- reading a copy against source
DFD is genuinely distinct: no positive control catches it, because both
copies are internally consistent, and re-derivation does not either,
because the copy faithfully reproduces what it was copied from. Found
when an inlined price sheet went stale within an hour of T11 changing
the real one.
So v1.2 stops trying to enumerate classes in advance. Every error in
three passes was corrected in-session for under ~1% of the pass, so the
stated design goal is now cheap CORRECTION: keep raw data so numbers are
re-derivable, keep artifacts small and committed so a wrong number is
one grep from everywhere quoting it, give every number a command.
Plus the one rule the new class earns: single source of fact.
The original hypothesis is revised rather than confirmed. "A rule that
cannot be executed is not a rule" is wrong -- the two most valuable
corrections in the project came from a decorative rule that cannot be
automated (re-derive inherited numbers). An executable rule fires
reliably and catches one class; a decorative one fires unreliably and
can catch any class, including unnamed ones. Keep both.
Gates this pass: loop-lint caught 3 real violations on first run, then
failed on its own author within the hour when a T07 edit pushed
InnerLoop.md to 407 lines against its own 400 limit.
CB-WP-0003 complete: 11 of 11 tasks done.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The review step targeted the survey. Every serious error in this project
has been in measurement or build configuration, so the loop was
adversarially reviewing the artifact cheapest to fix and leaving
unreviewed the one where errors occur.
Step 2 now routes by risk: when the claim rests on numbers, the reviewer
gets the harness and the evidence file too, and must reproduce the
number independently rather than read about it.
The addition that matters more, because it was learned the hard way: a
reviewer re-derives the author's claims and therefore inherits the
author's SAMPLING. CB-WP-0002's dedup invariant was checked twice --
survey 206/206 groups, then the reviewer independently -- and both used
the main transcript. It is false in the 8-response subagent tree neither
looked at. Two independent verifications, one shared blind spot.
Rule: the reviewer re-derives on a different sample than the author
used, and where only one sample exists, says so rather than reporting
a clean verify.
Also recorded: what review demonstrably DOES do. $0.66 and $1.11 across
two passes, ~1% of each, both finding approval-blocking defects. Cost is
not a reason to skip it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A blanket "no retargeting in the measuring commit" rule would have been
wrong. CB-WP-0002 moved AC-1 three times in exactly that shape and every
move was correct -- each time a new instrument disproved the old figure.
Four legitimate corrections would have been forbidden to catch one bad
retarget.
The test is mechanical rather than a statement of intent:
correction the target moves and the implementation does not; legal in
the same commit provided the instrument's output is there
retarget the same commit changes both the target and the code the
target measures; requires an ADR stating why the new target
binds on future work
Applied retroactively: AM-4a/AM-4b are UNRATIFIED. They were set after
seeing the measurement, in the commit that produced it, with the
implementation changing too -- a retarget by this test. make dep-weight
is currently enforcing a target no reviewed decision stands behind.
Recorded as an open item; ratifying or changing them is a maintainer
decision, not an implementer's.
Also: specs/InnerLoop.md split into InnerLoop.md (process) and
InnerLoopReference.md (rubric, template, rules, definition of done).
Not a stylistic choice -- `make loop-lint` failed on the commit that
pushed the file to 407 lines against its own ~400 limit. The gate added
this morning to make that rule executable caught its own author within
the hour, which is the cheapest possible demonstration that it works.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The mechanism never fired. Two rolls across two workplans (9, then 2)
against ~0.2 expected firings at d10. At ~2 tier decisions per workplan
it would take roughly twenty workplans to see four overrides -- a rate
that prevents its own evaluation, which T06 named as the one option to
reject.
Raised to d4 for the next 12 tier declarations, then kept, reverted to
d10, or deleted on the evidence. Expected ~3 firings.
Cost stated up front rather than discovered: a chaos-L override on
S-shaped work buys a full survey + review + ADR, and the comparable
measured figure is CB-WP-0001 T03 at $9.91. The window should cost
$20-30. Cheaper than carrying an unevaluated ritual indefinitely.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The 8k/10k per-task token budget was never referenced or enforced and
T08 blew past it silently. Replaced with a budget that can actually
fire.
The design constraint is the interesting part: per-task cost needs the
commit that CLOSES the task, so a per-task budget is unavoidably
retrospective -- it can only report a breach after the money is spent,
which is the dead-policy failure again. What IS observable mid-task is
spend since the last commit, because the transcript is append-live. So
the budget binds on the open remainder.
CB-01 budget = USD since the last commit, via `make cost-budget`
CB-02 soft $10.00 (state progress, decide), hard $22.00 (stop)
Calibrated on the 32 non-empty commit intervals of CB-WP-0001: p50
$1.40, p90 $9.36, max $10.80. Soft sits just below the observed maximum
-- it would have fired exactly once on the calibration pass. Hard is ~2x
the observed max, a value never reached in 32 intervals, so reaching it
means the session is doing something the data has no example of.
Both thresholds are set ABOVE every observed value, so they bind on
future work rather than ratifying present work -- the distinction T07
is about.
Stated limit: it is a command, not a daemon. An agent that never runs it
gets no signal, which is the dead-policy failure one level up. Mitigated
only by being free to run and on the one command surface.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
41 rules classified executable / checkable / decorative, each tagged with
the failure class it catches. Counts: 11 executable, 22 checkable, 4
decorative (one of them dead policy).
Audit: history/260731-inner-loop-rule-audit.md
New tools/loop-lint.py makes 7 rules executable (tier declared, chaos
roll recorded, tier-L review trail, unmeasured-in-evidence, whole-file
loadability, reporting tools expose --self-test). It found three real
violations on its first run, none previously visible:
- specs/ArchitectureBlueprint.md was 543 lines against a ~400 limit
the loop has stated since v0.2 and never measured. Split at its own
section boundaries into Blueprint (1-8) + Runtime (9-15).
- tools/dep-weight.py and tools/rule-coverage.py had positive-control
logic and no --self-test, so nothing verified the control worked.
Adding rule-coverage's self-test exposed a latent instance of the exact
class this workplan is about: if the spec regex stopped matching, rules
was empty, missing was empty, and the tool exited 0 reporting "0/0" --
a silent pass, in the tool that reports our headline AM-1 number. Both
tools now assert they found something before reporting.
Two demotions applied in the spec rather than left implicit: "structured
over prose" is marked guidance (nothing can check it), and the 8k/10k
token budget is struck through and marked DEAD POLICY pointing at T05.
The audit's uncomfortable finding: rule 13 (re-derive inherited numbers)
has no mechanical form, is deliberately left decorative, and caught the
LARGEST error in CB-WP-0002. That is a counter-example to this
workplan's own hypothesis. "A rule that cannot be executed is not a
rule" is wrong as stated; the defensible version is that such a rule
cannot be relied on to fire, so it must not be the only defence for a
class that matters.
Class coverage: harness-does-nothing has five executable rules;
trusted-arithmetic has ZERO and produced the largest single error.
make loop-lint and make self-tests wired into `make all` and CI.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Answers the question the workplan posed: did v1.0's "every metric names
its instrument" rule stop a metric being written without a working
instrument? No. AC-1 named `cb-cost --pin` before that tool existed and
set a hand-computed target of $92.87; the tool returned $93.32. The rule
was satisfied completely and the metric was still wrong.
v1.1 adds:
- the instrument must exist and the target must come out of it;
targets are provisional until the tool emits them
- a number inherited from earlier work is re-derived before use as a
target, or cited as unverified
- every reporting tool exposes --self-test, run before the number
- cost is in the definition of done; M-D2-CST may not be uncomputable
The cost of CB-WP-0001 was stated four times before it was right --
$248.46, $92.21, $92.87, $93.32 -- and each correction came from a
different mechanism: re-derivation, adversarial review, and the positive
control. None found more than one. That is the case for keeping all
three.
CB-WP-0003 T10 predicted the next error would be harness-does-nothing.
It was not, twice. Trusted arithmetic over real data would pass a
positive control; and a property verified on 206/206 groups of the main
transcript is false in the 8-response subagent tree that neither the
survey nor the reviewer examined separately. Review structurally cannot
catch the second -- re-deriving on the same sample reproduces the same
blind spot.
Workplan status: done.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- InnerLoop definition-of-done gains a cost row: M-D2-CST may no longer
be recorded uncomputable, and composition must be reported, not only a
total.
- InnerLoop Step 5 gains the --self-test contract: every tool that
reports a number exposes one, and it runs before the number does.
Rationale attached, because the case that motivated it is the one
review cannot catch — survey and reviewer both verified the same large
sample and both missed the small one.
- make cost / cost-test / cost-pin on the one command surface; cost-test
in `make all` and in CI.
- Hub now holds the measured figure for CB-WP-0001: 80.6M in / 323.6k
out against the 401,100 it previously estimated, low by ~200x. The
event states plainly that the hub schema cannot represent the 88% of
cost that is cache, and names `make cost-pin` as the authority.
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>
