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>
The framing hypothesis -- a rule that cannot be executed is not a rule
-- survives but was too coarse. CB-WP-0002 corrected one number four
times and each correction came from a DIFFERENT mechanism, none finding
more than one. Two limits are now measured rather than assumed:
- a positive control cannot catch trusted arithmetic (both errors in
$248.46 were sums over data that really existed)
- adversarial review cannot catch a same-sample blind spot: survey and
reviewer both verified dedup on the main transcript, and it is false
in the subagent tree neither examined
Task-level revisions:
T01 also classify each rule by WHICH failure class it catches; seven
instances across three classes are now on record
T02 scope reduced -- the --self-test contract, cb-cost's five
assertions, make cost-test in CI are delivered; remaining work is
rule-coverage/dep-weight plus a check that new tools carry one
T03 now backed by two measurements ($0.66, $1.11 at ~1% of a pass),
and must also state what review CANNOT do
T04 premise overturned -- sessions are bounded-quadratic, not
quadratic. /compact cut context 27x and cost/turn 3.1x. Measure
compaction against a fresh session before prescribing either
T05 unblocked, with calibration data ($1.29-$21.02/task) and the
constraint that a budget binds only on the 67.5% attribution
reaches, only after the closing commit
T07 sharpened -- CB-WP-0002 retargeted three times, correctly, so a
blanket prohibition is wrong; separate instrument-disproved-target
from implementation-missed-target
T10 its prediction is already falsified; the successor question is
whether class-by-class hardening converges at all
T11 NEW -- the price sheet cannot express a dated rate and becomes
wrong on 2026-08-31
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>
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>
Collector per ADR-0003: enumerates every transcript including the
subagents/ tree, dedups by requestId, prices per model and per cache
TTL, attributes on (prev_commit, this_commit] intervals, and reconciles
to the cent or aborts.
The positive control caught a real defect on its very first run against
real data, which is the entire argument for writing it:
CA-02 assumed usage is identical across the lines of one requestId.
True in the main transcript (206/206 groups, verified twice — by the
survey and by the adversarial reviewer). FALSE in the subagents/
tree, where output_tokens is a running count: one response reads
5, 5, 195 across its three lines. First-wins scored it at 5.
So CA-02 now splits: input-side counters are charged once and must be
identical (assertion retained); output_tokens resolves to the max
(CA-02a). AC-9 pins the exact 5,5,195 case as a regression test.
The acceptance target moved again as a result, for the third time:
$248.46 -> $92.21 -> $92.87 -> $93.32. AC-1 was computed by the same
first-wins method the tool just disproved, so the tool failing its
target was the tool being correct. Target updated, not the tool.
Measured at the pin: $92.21 main + $1.11 subagent = $93.32, residual
$0.000000. 32.5% UNATTRIBUTED, reported as its own line per CA-10.
make cost / cost-test / cost-pin wired; cost-test added to `make all`
and to CI, where it gates the collector's assertions without needing
transcripts present.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
T05 still named $248.46 as its acceptance test and the Purpose total
still omitted the subagent tree. Both corrected in place, with the
error sequence recorded rather than overwritten.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Normative spec for the cost model (dedup by requestId, per-model and
per-TTL pricing), the attribution contract (ending-at-commit intervals
scoped by sessionId), and the reported shape (composition, not a total).
Every acceptance row names the command that produces its number, per
InnerLoop Step 4. AC-5..AC-8 are the positive control: cb-cost
--self-test must fail on a dedup violation, on zero responses, on a
missing subagent tree, and on 5m cache priced at the 1h rate.
The feasibility check earns its place here: AC-1's $92.87 is reachable
only if CA-06 holds. The earlier $92.21 target was reachable only by a
collector with the exact blind spot the survey documented.
MetricsAndScenarios 1a superseded. Two of its rules struck through
rather than deleted, because both were wrong in instructive ways: "if
the cache split is unknown, count all input at full price" would have
priced 80.5M cache reads at 10x, and "the hub already records tokens"
named as a source what is only ever a lossy sink. M-D2-TOK demoted --
tokens are not comparable across models or cache states.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Instrument: session transcript JSONL, deduped by requestId, priced per
model and per cache TTL. Hub rejected as a source (no cache fields, ~100%
error on the same work), kept as sink. Status bar and billing API
rejected on availability.
Attribution: (prev_commit, this_commit] ending-at-commit, scoped by
sessionId. Explicit session markers rejected because they depend on an
agent remembering a step — the exact failure this workplan exists to fix.
Hub status transitions rejected as an after-the-fact time index.
Stated honestly: we buy accuracy with specification complexity, and D1
gets worse. That trade is only right because the alternative on offer was
not a simpler correct number but one wrong by two orders of magnitude.
Seven failure modes recorded up front, each becoming a T04 test — most
importantly that dedup fails in the under-reporting direction, so the
invariant is asserted at runtime rather than trusted.
Gate satisfied: T04 may now write collector code.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tier L (structural L, chaos d10=2). Every candidate exercised locally
against the CB-WP-0001 transcript rather than cited.
Verdict: session transcript JSONL is the only exact instrument; git
commits supply the attribution index it lacks; the State Hub is a
durable sink whose schema cannot express cache tokens at all; the
status bar and billing API are eliminated on availability.
Three errors found in this workplan's own Purpose section, all
overstating cost:
- one API response is written as up to six JSONL lines, each
repeating the same usage object (657 lines, 346 responses)
- a multi-model session was priced entirely at Fable 5 rates,
violating a per-model rule MetricsAndScenarios §1a already had
- the transcript is a live file, so an unpinned total is not
repeatable (346 -> 356 responses between two runs minutes apart)
CB-WP-0001 pinned at fc76445: $92.21, not $248.46. The qualitative
finding sharpens rather than weakens — 88.4% of spend is cache, at
256:1 cache-read to output tokens.
Neither error was of the harness-does-nothing class the positive
control was written for; both sums ran over real data. What caught
them was re-deriving a number instead of quoting it. Raised for T07
and for CB-WP-0003 T01.
Also measured: the one subagent (adversarial review) cost $0.66 and is
invisible to a collector reading only the main transcript.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Written back by fix-consistency: workstream and task UUIDs for the ten
CB-WP-0003 tasks, plus the regenerated WORK-RECORDS.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Covers what the immediate CI fixes did not. Framing finding: writing a
rule into InnerLoop did not prevent the next instance of the failure it
was written for; making it a CI step caught one on its first run. Four
instances of the harness-does-nothing class, zero prevented by prose.
Working hypothesis: a loop rule that cannot be executed is not a rule.
Each item is made executable or deleted, default delete.
Phase A makes rules executable: audit every InnerLoop rule as
executable/checkable/decorative, extend the positive-control gate beyond
benchmarks, and point adversarial review at measurement rather than only
research — all four real errors were in measurement and build config,
which the review never reads.
Phase B is session economics, from measurement: 592 turns, mean context
245k tokens, $0.245/turn in cache reads, zero batched tool calls, cache
reads 58% of cost against output at 12%. Cost is turns x context and
context grows with turns, so a long session is quadratic. Also replaces
the dead 8k/10k token budget, which was never enforced and which T08
exceeded by orders of magnitude with no signal.
Phase C removes or fixes the rest: resolve the chaos roll (never fired,
and at 1-in-10 will stay unevaluated), require retargeting to be an ADR
rather than something the implementer does in the commit that measures
the metric, give provisional items an owner and expiry, and strengthen
the coverage gate beyond tag-counting.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adopts both remediations from CB-EV-0001 §4 (maintainer decision).
Option A — serde_yaml is now optional behind cb-game-runtime's
`scenarios` feature. The scenario module, the ScenarioGame impl and the
string parsers behind it are cfg-gated; cb-sim opts in explicitly. Both
configurations compile and lint clean under -D warnings.
A trap worth recording: `default-features = false` on a *member*
dependency is silently ignored when the workspace dependency does not
specify it. The first attempt gated nothing while looking correct — the
build succeeded and cargo tree still showed all six YAML crates. Fixed
by setting it on the workspace dependency. This is the positive-control
failure mode in miniature: success was not evidence the change applied.
Retarget — AM-4 now measures third-party source under audit, split by
build configuration, replacing a crate count that was unreachable
without undoing K5/K7 and that does not compare across ecosystems.
Re-measured via the new `make dep-weight`, whose own positive control
refuses to report when any crate's source cannot be located:
shipped runtime 23 crates 246,250 lines target <=250,000 met
dev toolchain 29 crates 317,021 lines target <=350,000 met
own source 3,408 lines
Scenario tooling costs 70,771 lines a shipped game never compiles —
the split the single number was hiding.
Targets are set at current measurement plus headroom, so they bind on
future growth rather than retroactively passing what had failed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
AM-4: measured what each remediation option actually buys, rather than
leaving one recommendation unquantified. serde_yaml optional removes 6
crates, not 5 — ryu belongs to that group, since serde_json now uses
zmij for floats. Full ladder: -6 to 27, serde_json -4 more to 23,
inlining SHA-256 -8 to 19, inlining ChaCha12 -4 to 15. Only
reimplementing a primitive gets under 20, so the target is unreachable
without undoing K5/K7.
Also records that crate count compares badly across ecosystems, and
offers the alternative the count is a proxy for: 307,317 lines of
third-party source under audit against 3,398 of our own.
AM-12: corrected from "uncomputable" to measured. The refusal to
estimate was right; the claim that no instrument existed was wrong.
Session transcripts carry exact per-message usage including the cache
breakdown. This session cost $248.46 at Fable 5 rates, of which 53% is
cache reads — cost is driven by context size times turn count, not by
output volume. What is still missing is per-task attribution, since
nothing marks task boundaries in a transcript.
CB-WP-0002 makes cost measurable and attributable: survey the
instruments, decide the attribution model by ADR, spec metrics that
include cost composition rather than a bare total, build a collector
whose positive control refuses to emit unreconciled numbers, and prove
it by answering a question that could not be answered before.
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>
