frontend-patterns/research/reviews/ResearchPipelineRefinement.md

Research pipeline refinement

Date: 2026-09-25. Reviewer: codex, self-review. Work owner: FEP-WP-0002-T02.

Changes and verification

Current prompts require bounded stage output, unknown recurrence when evidence is missing, located implementation evidence for known uses, and a JSON candidate ledger. Relations must resolve Pnn endpoints against that ledger; Cnn claims cannot be endpoints. The assisted critique explicitly challenges these failure modes.

scripts/research_admission.py screens the ledger and relations without granting admission. Its tests exercise the unchanged Carniato -03 artifacts, unsourced known uses, unsupported recurrence, duplicate IDs, malformed contracts, claim endpoints and valid empty outcomes. The captured Carniato case is blocked: missing ledger, and unresolved C01/C02 endpoints. A missing ledger also prevents resolving its P01 endpoint under the new contract; this is format incompatibility, not proof that P01 never existed. Report: screening JSON.

The screen does not interpret prose or establish citation truth, independent uses, source fidelity or semantic prerequisites. Passing it never grants admission. The new generation prompts have not yet been demonstrated end-to-end in a successful live run; offline checks establish the contract, not model compliance.

Bounded live experiment

Fresh workspace: research/bench/infospaces/local-first-authority-03. Original source bytes are unchanged from -01; revised prompts are copied and hashed. Requested llm-connect profile: custodian-triage-balanced; reasoning effort: low; maximum completion tokens: 6,000 per response; service call ceiling: four. No automatic client retries or repeat workspace runs. Provider retries are unknown.

Result: failed at claims, finish_reason length, resolved model google/gemini-2.5-flash; 525 prompt tokens + 6,000 completion tokens = 6,525 reported total tokens. No generated research artifacts. The remaining three service calls were not made. Dollar cost is unknown. Receipt: run record.

This combined prompt/settings intervention did not resolve truncation. It does not show whether the requested reasoning setting was honored or whether token use was visible output, internal reasoning, or repetition. Existing receipts lack that breakdown. No causal conclusion or model-quality conclusion follows. Failed runs remain immutable; no further live retry was made in this cycle.

Next work

T02 remains in progress. Before another paid attempt, establish service-side visibility into effective reasoning settings and completion-token breakdown, or select a documented research profile with predictable output behavior. Future client receipts now retain content length and hash to distinguish empty output from a nonempty incomplete response; this cannot retroactively diagnose existing failures. Do not retrieve workload credentials or change a deployment to obtain diagnostics.

Once a run completes, apply structural screening, then editorial source/prose review. Known uses and recurrence remain unknown until independently verified. T03 still owns the server-authoritative and offline-field-note walkthroughs and draft corpus; this tooling cycle does not admit patterns or complete source research.