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>
274 lines
13 KiB
Markdown
274 lines
13 KiB
Markdown
# CB-EV-0001 — GROUND game kernel: acceptance evidence
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Status: **T08 complete. AM-4 remediated and re-measured 2026-07-31.**
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Recorded: 2026-07-31. Amended 2026-07-31 — §4 gains measured savings per
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remediation option, and §5 corrects AM-12 from "uncomputable" to
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measured-at-session-level; see CB-WP-0002.
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Workplan: CB-WP-0001, task T08
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Spec: `specs/GameKernel.md` §4 (AM-1..AM-12)
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Baseline: `research/CB-RES-0001-game-kernel.md`, measurements in
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`research/CB-RES-0001-harness/boardgame-io/results-260731.json`
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Machine: WSL2, Linux 6.18.33.2-microsoft-standard-WSL2, rustc 1.97.1,
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`--release`, Criterion 1s warm-up / 3s measurement.
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## 1. Scoreboard
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| Metric | Target | Measured | Verdict |
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|---|---|---|---|
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| AM-1 rule coverage | 100% of GR-rules | 58/58 (100%) | **met** |
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| AM-4a dep weight, shipped runtime | ≤250,000 third-party lines | 246,250 (23 crates) | **met** | <!-- fact:am4a_loc -->
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| AM-4b dep weight, dev toolchain | ≤350,000 third-party lines | 317,021 (29 crates) | **met** | <!-- fact:am4b_loc -->
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| AM-6 throughput | ≥100,000 events/s | 1,651,400 events/s | **met, 16.5×** |
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| AM-7 scaling | ≥0.9× at 20× workload | 1.08× | **met** |
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| AM-7 replay | 100k events ≤5s | 2.18 ms (CI 2.14–2.23) | **met, 2,290×** |
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| AM-8 determinism | zero divergence, 10 replays | 1 distinct hash / 10 runs | **met** |
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| AM-8 lint | fmt + clippy clean | clean, `-D warnings` | **met** |
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| AM-10 foreign types | zero `HashMap`/`HashSet` | 0 | **met** |
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| AM-11 impl pairs | null + reference per port | 1 of 1 (`KernelRng`) | **met, narrow** |
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| AM-12 cost | per-task USD | $248.46 session; per-task pending | **partial** |
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AM-2, AM-3, AM-5 and AM-9 are not reported: see §6.
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## 2. Throughput and scaling (AM-6, AM-7)
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Workload: 3-player GROUND rounds, 7 commands and 13 events per round
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(12 on a game's fifth round, where GR-R09 ends the game). Pinned by
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`bench_shape` in `games/ground/src/lib.rs`, so a change to the workload
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breaks the test rather than silently rescaling the metric.
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| Rounds | Throughput (events/s) | vs 5k |
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|---|---|---|
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| 5,000 | 1,524,200 | 1.00× |
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| 10,000 | 1,638,200 | 1.07× |
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| 20,000 | 1,577,000 | 1.03× |
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| 40,000 | 1,626,000 | 1.07× |
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| 100,000 | 1,651,400 | 1.08× |
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Replay — folding one growing event log back into state (Criterion
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95% CI, low/median/high):
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| Events | Time (median) | 95% CI | Rate |
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|---|---|---|---|
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| 10,010 | 184.8 µs | 180.9 – 189.3 µs | 54.2M events/s |
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| 100,072 | 2.183 ms | 2.142 – 2.226 ms | 45.8M events/s |
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**Correction (2026-07-31).** These originally read 465 µs / 4.13 ms and
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were taken from the `replay_probe` **test**, not from the benchmark —
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because the benchmark did not work. See §2a.
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### The comparison against boardgame.io, stated carefully
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boardgame.io measured **1,930 moves/s at 5,000 moves**, falling to
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**870 moves/s at 20,000**, and **did not finish 100,000 moves in 300 s**.
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Our figure in the same unit is ~129,000 rounds/s × 7 = **~903,000
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commands/s**, and 100,000 rounds complete in 776 ms.
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That is roughly a 400–500× ratio, and it is **not a like-for-like
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measurement**. Four differences matter, all favouring us:
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1. **Different language and process model.** Rust in-process against
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Node.js with immutable state, patch generation and undo history.
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2. **Different feature set.** boardgame.io's per-move cost includes
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producing client patches and maintaining undo state; the run with
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`--disable-undo` still degraded (0.66× at 40k). We do neither.
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3. **Different workload shape.** Our 5-round games (GR-R09) bound state
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size by construction. The boardgame.io harness ran one match with
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unbounded history, which is exactly the axis it degraded on.
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4. **No network or storage layer** on our side.
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Point 3 is the important one and it is why the flat curve in the table
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above is *weak evidence on its own* — a game that resets every five
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rounds cannot exhibit history-growth degradation. The replay benchmark
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is the honest test of that axis, because there the log grows without
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bound, and it stays linear (21.5M → 24.2M events/s from 10k to 100k).
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**Claim we are willing to defend:** the kernel meets AM-6 and AM-7 with
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large margin, and does not degrade as event-log length grows.
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**Claim we are not making:** that Clay-Borg is ~450× "faster than
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boardgame.io" as a like-for-like engine comparison. Per the
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InnerLoop parity-cap rule, a cross-runtime ratio this coarse is not a
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verdict, it is a direction.
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### A measurement error found and corrected
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The first run of this benchmark reported **9.3M events/s with a
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perfectly flat curve** — a number that would have been reported as a
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93× beat of AM-6. It was wrong. The workload had P2 selecting SUPPORT
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every round while being attacked; after three rounds P2 sat at Stress 4,
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GR-R03 rejected the SUPPORT, the round never completed, and the loop
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spun on rejected commands. Throughput was computed as
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`rounds × 13 events` while most rounds produced 2.
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Found by a probe test asserting that a round produces events at all.
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The benchmark now asserts the per-round event count on every round and
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panics rather than measuring a stalled loop. The corrected figure is
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**5.6× lower** than the bogus one.
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### 2a. A fourth measurement error, found by enforcing the rule
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The replay benchmark committed alongside this evidence was **the broken
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version**. A `python3` patch that was supposed to replace its
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log-building loop never applied, leaving a sequence that omits `Resolve`
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— so `EndRound` was rejected, every round produced no events, and the
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`while log.len() < target` loop spun forever. It was never run to
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completion; the AM-7 replay numbers were taken from a separate probe
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test instead, and the dead benchmark was committed and left hanging.
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Found by adding `cargo bench -- --test` to CI, which runs every
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benchmark once. That is the fourth instance of one error class in this
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project — a harness that appears to work while doing no work — and the
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**first one caught by a gate rather than by noticing**.
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The replay loop now carries the positive control the round loop already
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had: it asserts each round appended events and fails rather than
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spinning. Corrected figures are in the table above; both configurations
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still clear the AM-7 budget by three orders of magnitude.
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The lesson recorded for the loop: writing the positive-control rule into
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`specs/InnerLoop.md` did **not** prevent the next instance. Making it a
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CI step did. Prose rules do not enforce themselves.
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## 3. Determinism (AM-8)
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- Every scenario runs twice per invocation with the same seed and fails
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on state-hash divergence (K8). 21/21 pass.
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- Ten consecutive full runs of all 21 scenarios produced **one distinct
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output hash**, i.e. zero divergence.
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- `cargo fmt --check` and `cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets
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-D warnings` are clean.
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- `clippy.toml` denies `HashMap`/`HashSet` workspace-wide (K6); the
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aggregate holds only ordered collections, so iteration order cannot
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vary between runs.
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## 4. AM-4 — remediated and re-measured
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**Original result: NOT MET, 33 transitive crates against a ≤20 target.**
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Resolved by adopting both remediations (maintainer decision,
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2026-07-31): `serde_yaml` was made optional, and the metric was
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retargeted onto third-party source under audit.
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### Re-measurement (`make dep-weight`)
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| Configuration | Crates | Third-party LOC | Target | Verdict |
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|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Shipped runtime (`--no-default-features`) | 23 | 246,250 | ≤250,000 | **met** | <!-- fact:am4a_loc --><!-- fact:am4a_target -->
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| Dev toolchain (default features) | 29 | 317,021 | ≤350,000 | **met** | <!-- fact:am4b_loc --><!-- fact:am4b_target -->
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| Our own source | — | 3,408 | — | — |
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Scenario tooling costs **70,771 lines that a shipped game never
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compiles**. That split is the substantive result: the single number
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previously reported conflated a runtime concern with a test concern.
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**What actually changed in the build.** `cb-game-runtime` gained a
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`scenarios` feature carrying `serde_yaml`; the scenario module, the
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`ScenarioGame` impl and the string parsers behind it are `#[cfg]`-gated.
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Both configurations compile and lint clean under `-D warnings`.
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One trap worth recording: setting `default-features = false` on a
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*member* dependency is silently ignored when the workspace dependency
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does not specify it, so the first attempt gated nothing while appearing
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to work — `cargo tree` still showed all six YAML crates. The fix was
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setting `default-features = false` on the workspace dependency itself,
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with `cb-sim` opting into `scenarios` explicitly. This is exactly the
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class of error InnerLoop v1.0's positive-control rule targets: the build
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succeeded and the feature flag looked applied. It was caught by checking
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the dependency graph rather than trusting that the edit had worked.
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### Why the target moved, and why that is not moving the goalposts
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The ≤20 crate target was retired for two measured reasons, both
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recorded before the decision was taken:
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Attribution:
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| Group | Crates | Count |
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| `sha2` (K7 state hashing) | sha2, digest, block-buffer, crypto-common, generic-array, typenum, cpufeatures, cfg-if | 8 |
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| serde derive chain | serde_derive, proc-macro2, quote, syn, unicode-ident | 5 |
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| serde runtime + json | serde, serde_core, serde_json, itoa, memchr, zmij | 6 |
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| `serde_yaml` (scenario files only) | serde_yaml, unsafe-libyaml, indexmap, hashbrown, equivalent, ryu | 6 |
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| `rand_chacha` (K5 seeded RNG) | rand_chacha, rand_core, ppv-lite86, zerocopy | 4 |
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| Clay-Borg crates | cb-kernel, cb-events, cb-game-runtime, games-ground | 4 |
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1. **It was unreachable without undoing the spec's own contracts.**
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Measured ladder: `serde_yaml` optional −6 (→27), dropping
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`serde_json` −4 (→23), inlining SHA-256 −8 (→19), inlining ChaCha12
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−4 (→15). Nothing reaches 20 except reimplementing a primitive that
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K5 or K7 requires — trading an audited implementation for a
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scoreboard number.
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2. **Crate count does not compare across ecosystems.** Rust splits
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crates far more finely than npm. The same granularity difference made
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"33 vs 120 npm packages" flatter us *and* made ≤20 punish us.
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Third-party source under audit is what the count was proxying for, is
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comparable across ecosystems, and cannot be gamed by granularity. The
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new targets are set at roughly the current measurement plus headroom,
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so they bind on future growth rather than retroactively passing
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something that failed: adding another `serde_yaml`-sized dependency to
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the shipped runtime would breach AM-4a.
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What we did **not** do: hand-roll SHA-256 or ChaCha to win a count.
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## 5. Cost log (AM-12)
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Per `specs/MetricsAndScenarios.md` §1a. Model: Claude Fable 5, at
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`benchmarks/baselines/model-prices.toml` rates ($10/$50 per MTok).
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| Task | Model | Iterations | Notes |
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| CB-WP-0001 (whole session, T01–T09) | claude-fable-5 | 6 T08 code iterations + benchmarks | $248.46 measured; per-task split pending CB-WP-0002 |
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**Correction (2026-07-31).** This section originally recorded AM-12 as
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*uncomputable*. That was wrong. The declining to estimate was right; the
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conclusion that no instrument existed was not. Every session transcript
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(`~/.claude/projects/<slug>/<session>.jsonl`) carries exact per-message
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`usage` including the cache breakdown. Read for this session:
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| Component | Tokens | Cost (Fable 5) |
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| Output | 585,528 | $29.28 |
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| Cache read | 131,863,164 | $131.86 |
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| Cache write (1h) | 4,365,668 | $87.31 |
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| Input | 1,090 | $0.01 |
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| **Session total** | | **$248.46** (~$124 on Opus 5) |
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**53% of the cost is cache reads**, not output. Cost in an agentic loop
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is driven by context size × turn count, which no "tokens per task"
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metric would have surfaced.
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Still missing is *attribution*: this is a whole-session figure, not a
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per-task one, because nothing marks task boundaries in the transcript.
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That is what CB-WP-0002 is for. The AM-12 row above should be read as
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"session-level cost measured; per-task attribution pending CB-WP-0002".
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## 6. Metrics not reported
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- **AM-2, AM-3, AM-5** — specification-quality metrics that need a
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second capability to compare against; a single data point is not a
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measurement.
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- **AM-9 (≤64MB)** — not instrumented. The aggregate is a few KB and
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the largest log measured here is 100k events, so the budget is very
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unlikely to bind, but "unlikely" is not "measured" and it is left
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unclaimed.
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- **AM-11** — the `KernelRng` null/reference pair exists and is
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exercised. It is the only port with a pair so far, so the metric is
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met narrowly and will mean more once storage has one.
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## 7. Rules implemented under a provisional default
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Ten U-items in `specs/GroundRules.md` carry PROVISIONAL defaults. Those
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realized here are U2 (clamp on every application), U3 (DENY with no
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legal target is a no-op that still advances), U4 (deck reshuffle), U5
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(REVERSE owner relief applies whether or not the Reverse was rejected)
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and U8 (GROUND—OU cancellation precedes Protection).
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One further ambiguity was found during T08 and is **not** in the U-list:
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**GR-E02's "successes"** is undefined in dataset 0.1. It is implemented
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as the count of claimed Problems. Both scoring scenarios are marked
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`provisional: true`.
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All provisional behaviour lives behind named functions and is covered by
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scenarios tagged `provisional: true`, so a ground-game ruling flips a
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scenario rather than the kernel (K16). **Action for ground-game:** rule
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on the ten U-items and on GR-E02's "successes".
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