Replaces the three hand-done steps of a task close (46 turns, $11.52 per
CB-RES-0003): the heredoc flipping status in the workplan file, the
hand-written hub call, and the hand-typed token counts.
The third is the reason this task exists. Every update_task_status this
repo produced carried estimated tokens_in/tokens_out — in a project whose
central finding is that estimated token counts are worthless. task-done
reads the measured figure from the transcripts, or refuses; there is no
path through it that emits an estimate.
cb-cost gains by_task_detail: cost, response count, model histogram and
token components per task. task-done imports cb-cost rather than parsing
its printed table, so the hub figure is not a copy that can drift from
its source.
The positive control found a real defect before the tool ran once.
Attribution keyed on a bare T\d\d from the commit subject, so CB-WP-0002
T01, CB-WP-0003 T01 and CB-WP-0004 T01 shared a bucket: the self-test
reported $12.10 for "T01" where the qualified figure is $2.33. That 5.2x
overstatement would have been pushed to the hub as a *measured* number —
the same fiction in a new form. task_label() now keys qualified subjects
on the full id and leaves unqualified ones bare rather than
retro-assigning them to a workplan. The pinned $93.15 benchmark is
unchanged, so historical attribution was not disturbed.
Fourth instance of trusted arithmetic: a number believed because a
program produced it rather than a hand.
Refusals, all exercised by --self-test: unknown id, typo'd id,
already-done task, missing state_hub_task_id, no measured spend, and a
status flip that produced no change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CB-RES-0003 measured 84 turns and $15.33 — the largest mechanical
category — spent prefixing commands with `cd` and
`export PATH="$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH"`. Both causes are now fixed once
instead of per-leaf.
tools/repo.py resolves the repo root from __file__ and cargo from PATH
then the standard rustup locations. Every tool imports ROOT from it, so
the repo path is stated once rather than redefined in four files —
single source of fact, the rule DFD earned in InnerLoop v1.2.
rule-coverage and dep-weight now call enter_root(), which is why their
relative paths did not need rewriting one by one.
The Makefile derives REPO from MAKEFILE_LIST and resolves CARGO the same
way, so `make -C <repo> <target>` works from any directory with no
prefix.
make env-test is the positive control, and is in `make all`: every tool
runs from / with PATH=/usr/bin:/bin. Without it this fix could regress
silently and invalidate T05's measurement — the whole point of the
control loop.
dep-weight's "cargo not on PATH" error is kept rather than deleted. It
should now be unreachable, and --self-test asserts cargo_bin() resolves
unaided; a control that never fires is cheaper than a regression.
loop-lint failed on repo.py on its first run — a reporting tool with a
positive control but no --self-test entry point. Second time the gate
has caught work from its own pass within the hour.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Review of where token-priced turns did work a deterministic tool could
do. Method: classify every turn in both transcripts by the tool calls it
made. The classifier is committed in tools/cb-cost.py and emitted by
`make cost-mix`, so the baseline is reproducible and the same command
can later falsify the predictions.
mech environment setup 84 turns $15.33
mech ad-hoc text patching 75 turns $13.86
git 37 turns $13.85
mech hub task status 25 turns $ 7.46
mech orientation / inspect 49 turns $ 6.87
hub other 32 turns $ 6.22
mech ad-hoc transcript 39 turns $ 4.56
mech workplan status edit 21 turns $ 4.06
MECHANICAL (dedup) 290 turns $51.26 = 38% of pass
Largest category is `cd` and `export PATH` -- pure friction, and
dep-weight.py already patched it at the leaf, which is evidence it was
noticed and fixed in the wrong place. Second is heredocs string-patching
markdown, which is also the mechanism behind duplicated-fact drift, the
error class InnerLoop v1.2 names and cannot gate.
Explicitly NOT automated: git (37 turns, $13.85) is mostly commit
message authorship -- the highest-output turns in the corpus and the
project's reasoning record. Automating it would save money and destroy
what makes corrections cheap.
CB-WP-0004 implements five candidates and predicts $33-41 recovery
(25-30%), below the 38% measured share on purpose: some inspection and
patching is genuinely exploratory.
The control loop is the deliverable, not a formality. T05 tests three
things and must report all: did mechanical turns disappear, did they
RELOCATE into prose, and did quality hold. If mechanical turns fall and
prose rises by as much, the saving is zero and that is the result to
publish.
Also a self-indictment worth recording: every hub update_task_status in
this project carried hand-typed token estimates, in a repo whose central
finding is that estimated token counts are worthless. T02 fixes it by
reading measured values from cb-cost.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The price sheet had two defects of one shape -- a schema that could not
hold the fact it needed, the same criticism the cost survey levelled at
the State Hub.
CA-16 time-boxed rates are DATA. Sonnet's intro price lived in a
`# intro ...` comment and was invisible to the collector that
reads the file. Now promo_input/promo_output/promo_until,
applied per response at its own timestamp.
CA-17 the 90-day staleness rule was prose in MetricsAndScenarios 1a
that every M-D2-CST verdict silently inherited. Now `recorded`
+ `max_age_days` in the sheet, and a stale sheet ABORTS.
Both are exercised by make cost-test: the promo rate must apply before
2026-08-31 and lapse after, and a 102-day-old sheet must trip.
Applying CA-16 moved AC-1 from $93.32 to $93.15 -- the $0.17 CB-EV-0002
predicted, now collected rather than noted. That is a legitimate
retarget under T07's distinction: the instrument disproved the target,
and its output is in this commit. The number has now been stated five
times ($248.46, $92.21, $92.87, $93.32, $93.15), each correction from a
different mechanism.
Evidence tables regenerated from the tool rather than hand-patched,
per CA-15 -- which is the rule that exists because hand-typed tables
were the only thing the adversarial review found wrong.
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>
AC-1 $93.32 ($92.21 main + $1.11 subagent), residual $0.000000. No
unmeasured rows. Composition: 88.0% cache, 11.9% output, 249:1 context
re-read to text written.
The question that could not be answered before: what /compact costs.
The transcript records it directly — 542,991 -> 19,974 tokens, a 27x
reduction. Cost per turn fell from $0.457 (136 turns before) to $0.149
(202 turns after). The 202 post-compact turns cost less than half the
136 before them.
This qualifies CB-WP-0003 T04: sessions are bounded-quadratic, not
quadratic. Cost grows with context between compactions and resets at
each one, so the failure mode is a long UNCOMPACTED session. Whether a
fresh session beats a compaction is now measurable, and T04 should
measure it before prescribing one task per session.
Stale $0.66/$92.87 targets updated across survey and workplan.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
