The question was whether converting agent work to deterministic tooling
recovers capacity or the work reappears elsewhere. Neither, cleanly:
tooling recovers capacity where it removes the possibility of doing the
work by hand, and recovers nothing where it merely offers a better
option.
Sorting the five candidates by that test reproduces the results exactly.
env-setup and task-done left no manual path — env-test fails the build if
the friction returns, and task-done refuses to emit an estimate, so the
old way means knowingly writing fiction. Both met. facts-check and
`make status` left grep and heredocs one keystroke away. Both missed.
This is the principle ADR-0003 already used to reject explicit session
markers — nothing that depends on discipline gets to be the primary
index. It governs tooling economics too, and CB-RES-0003 did not apply
it.
Stated confidence sorted the extremes and said nothing in the middle,
where every judgement call lives: both high met, both medium missed, and
the single low also met, so it was miscalibrated at that end too. Future
reviews state the mechanism instead — after this fix, is the manual path
impossible, absurd, or merely inferior? — and only the first two may
carry a cost prediction.
The confound is symmetric and does not explain the split: building
repo.py and task-done.py also required inspection and patching, and those
categories still went to zero. It inflates the size of the miss, not its
location.
The most valuable output is not the 6 points of 38 recovered. It is that
the loop made a falsifiable quantitative forecast, was wrong by 4-5x, and
could say exactly which parts were wrong and why.
CB-WP-0004 status -> done.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tegwick
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