clay-borg/evidence/CB-EV-0009-inspectable-table.md

# CB-EV-0009 — the chaos roll fired, and what it cost

CB-WP-0011 T03. Measured 2026-08-02 at `HEAD` after T02. Pass kind
`product`.

This is the first pass in which the chaos mechanism changed a tier, so
the first question is the one the calibration window exists to answer.

---

## 1. Did tier S produce a worse outcome than tier L would have?

**No — and the reason is not "tier L was unnecessary". It is that the
roll forced a decomposition that was better than the one I had planned.**

The declaration:

```
structural tier  L   (INTENT stage 1 creates a new capability port)
chaos            d4 = 4  → override fires
override roll    shuf -e S M L → S
```

Before the roll I had the shape of the tier-L pass in hand: a survey
(`CB-RES-0006`) whose leading constraint would have been **AM-4a's 3,750
lines of headroom** — 246,250 of a 250,000 target, measured — followed by
an ADR choosing a 2D toolkit and standing up `cb-render-api` /
`cb-render-null`.

Tier S has no survey and no ADR, and the hard gate — *no implementation
code for a capability exists before its ADR is committed* — is not a tier
weight and does not roll down. So the two rules met head-on, and the
resolution was to **split the declaration**: take the part of stage 1
that creates no port and adds no dependency, and leave the port to its
own declaration and its own roll.

What that split surfaced is the finding this pass acted on:

> `cb-play` already had a renderer. It had had one since stage 0. It was
> showing **24 of the 41** leaf paths a populated `GroundView` carries.

A tier-L pass would have opened by surveying 2D toolkits. It would have
been surveying how to *draw* a table whose text renderer was silently
dropping the DARVO state machine, the GROUND practice, the scoring mode,
the Focus tokens, the discard pile, per-seat protection, and every part
of the outcome except the headline. **The port was the wrong first
question**, and nothing in the structural tier derivation could have said
so, because the trigger fires on "creates a capability port" — a property
of the *plan*, not of the code.

**Stated against my own prior.** In the turn before the roll I recommended
tier L and said the AM-4a headroom "should lead the survey". The roll
deleted the survey and the pass was better for it. One data point, and it
is one data point — but it is the *first* evidence the CHAOS gate has
produced in six declarations, and it points the way the mechanism's
defenders hoped and I did not expect.

**What tier L would have caught that this pass did not.** Being honest in
the other direction: this pass made a real interface change —
`cb_game_runtime::replay::open`, extracted so the inspector and the replay
gate share one bundle reader — with no review and no ADR. It is small,
dev-only, and flagged in its commit per the chaos limits, and I believe it
is right. But "I believe it is right" is exactly what a tier-L review
exists not to accept, and that is the cost side of the ledger.

**Carried, not concluded.** Six of twelve declarations used, one override.
The retire condition in `gates.toml` asks whether an overridden tier ever
produces *a different outcome than the argued one*. It just did. That is
recorded as the gate's first `caught` entry, and the window stays open —
one favourable fire is not a calibration.

## 2. The field-coverage gap, before and after

| | leaf paths shown |
|---|---|
| before (stage-0 renderer) | **24** of 41 |
| after | **41** of 41, plus 1 declared omitted |

**Measured, not counted.** The old renderer was spliced back in beside the
new fixture and run. That matters, because the first two figures I wrote
for this — "42 of 43, up from 24", in the T01 commit message — were
counted by hand and both were wrong. The trusted-arithmetic class, in a
pass whose entire subject is a gate against unverified claims.

The measurement also corrects itself in the honest direction:
`outcome.winners.*` shows as missing under the new token but *was* being
rendered, in a different format. So **16 fields were genuinely absent**,
not 17. That is the number to quote.

The one deliberate omission is `players.*.hand` — `null` for every seat
but the viewer, where the absence is what `hand N card(s)` renders.

**The gate caught a field its own author had missed**, on its first run,
before it had ever been committed: `players.*.hand` was in neither list.
That is the entry worth having in `M-D1-MUT`'s ledger, more than the three
mutations I designed on purpose.

## 3. What no test could have caught, and why

Worth writing down as a class, because it is new here:

> Every assertion a renderer test naturally makes — *the output mentions
> the round*, *the output is non-empty*, *P2's hand does not appear* — is
> satisfied by a renderer that shows a third of the state.

This is the harness-does-nothing class in **presentation** form. The
harness runs, the assertions are real, and they are all satisfied by the
defect. What breaks it is asserting over the *shape of the input* rather
than the content of the output: walk the serialized view, require every
leaf path to be classified, and make silence cost a build.

Paths, not keys. `problem` occurs under a DARVO target, a GROUND choice
and a Selection; a key-set walk would let one of the three vouch for the
other two.

## 4. Cost, shape, and the meta budget

| pass | kind | responses | cost | $/response |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CB-WP-0006 | meta | 158 | $57.22 | 0.362 |
| CB-WP-0007 | meta | 21 | $7.95 | 0.298 |
| CB-WP-0008 | product | 134 | $17.38 | 0.123 |
| CB-WP-0009 | meta | 46 | $11.31 | 0.246 |
| CB-WP-0010 | product | 26 | $4.08 | 0.157 |
| **CB-WP-0011** | **product** | **45** | **$4.23** | **0.094** |

**The cheapest pass per response yet recorded**, against a previous best
of 0.123. Two mechanical causes, both boring and both worth keeping:

- it opened immediately after a compaction (§ below), and
- every task had a `cargo test` between it and being wrong.

The CB-WP-0009 figure moved from $6.73 (as reported in CB-EV-0008 §4) to
$11.31. That is not a correction: CB-EV-0008 was written *during*
CB-WP-0009, and the responses after it are attributed to the pass they
belong to. A pass cannot measure its own final cost, and reporting one
mid-pass will always read low.

### Session shape

| metric | this pass | previous pass opened at | target |
|---|---|---|---|
| SH-1 mean context | **147,808** | 338,852 `[HARD]` | ≤ 200,000 |
| SH-2 p90 context | **149,262** | 339,342 `[SOFT]` | ≤ 300,000 |
| SH-3 batching | 0.0% `[SOFT]` | 0.0% | ≥ 20% |

Both context metrics went from breach to comfortably inside, and the
lever was one `/compact` before the pass opened. That is now the second
time the same lever has produced the cheapest pass on record
(CB-WP-0008 was the first). Two observations are not a law, but the
prediction is cheap and falsifiable: **the next pass opened above the
SH-1 hard line will cost more per response than 0.123.**

SH-3 stays at 0.0% against a 20% floor and remains unfalsified and
unremedied. It has now read 0.0% for five consecutive passes.

### Meta budget

**58% of the trailing three, against a soft 25%** — up from 45%, during
two consecutive `product` passes.

That is not an instrument defect, but it is a property worth naming: the
budget is a **cost share**, so two cheap product passes move it less than
one expensive meta pass moved it up. CB-WP-0009's $11.31 is 58% of the
$19.62 the window holds, and it leaves the window on the next pass.

**Falsifiable prediction:** if the next pass is `product`, the trailing-3
meta share drops to **0%**, because CB-WP-0009 will be the pass that
rolled off. If it does not, the windowing is wrong in a way neither
CB-EV-0007 §3 nor CB-EV-0008 §1 found.

No product work was displaced by meta work in this pass — nothing meta
was opened. The number is over the line and reported under the rule that
requires reporting it.

## 5. Open

- **Stage 1 is not shipped.** This is its inspectable half. INTENT's
  stage-1 line stays open; the port, the visualization and
  drag-to-propose are untouched.
- **The port declaration is still owed**, structurally tier L, with its
  own chaos roll, and with AM-4a's 3,750-line headroom as its leading
  constraint. That number is unchanged by this pass — nothing was added
  to the shipped runtime.
- **CHAOS has its first `caught` entry** and stays open to 2026-09-30.
- **GATE-REVIEW still has none**, one pass older.
- **SH-3 at 0.0% for five passes.** Either the floor is wrong or the
  behaviour is, and neither has been argued.
- **`cb-play` is now two tools in one binary.** Play and inspect share a
  renderer and nothing else. If a third mode arrives, that is the second
  use, and the split should be reconsidered then rather than now.