test-driver/history/2026-08-23-td-wp-0002-gate-review.md

TD-WP-0002 — Gate Review and First Compression Pass

Date: 2026-08-23 Workplan: TD-WP-0002 — Vertical spike: falsify the crystallization thesis Tests: 172 passing · Lab catalogue: 24 labelled mutations Assessment that set the direction: history/2026-08-22-concept-assessment-swot.md

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1. The gate

The workplan fixed four criteria in advance, before any code existed.

Criterion 1 — recover from M01 and M02 with zero claim or invariant changes

Met.

Mutation	Classification	Claim set unchanged	Accepted without a human
M01 sharing control moved into a modal	MECHANICAL_ADAPTATION	yes	yes
M02 DOM rewritten, test ids dropped	MECHANICAL_ADAPTATION	yes	yes

The claim set is unchanged by construction, not by good behaviour: claims are run inputs and the adaptation machinery has no write path to them (D-02).

Criterion 2 — the authorization defect is reported as a Product Finding

Met, with a naming correction. The workplan inherited "M05" from the original milestones document; in the catalogue as built, the authorization defect is M15 (revocation updates the record but not enforcement). All three authorization defects behave correctly:

Mutation	Classification	Regressions reported
M15 revoke is cosmetic	BEHAVIOUR_CHANGED	c-bob-revoked, i-enforcement-matches-record
M17 anyone can read anything	BEHAVIOUR_CHANGED	5 assertions across 3 steps
M20 tenant isolation leaks	BEHAVIOUR_CHANGED	5 assertions across 3 steps

None is safe to accept. The classifier collapses PRODUCT_DEFECT and SEMANTIC_CHANGE into one escalating outcome — see F-0006 — so "Product Finding" in the original wording is now "escalated to a human with the regressions named".

Criterion 3 — one asset crystallizes into a deterministic test

Met. crystallized/test_grant_access.py is generated, runs with no model involvement, preserves its ancestor's oracle set as a superset, agrees with the ancestor across five lab versions, still catches a seeded defect, and carries its lineage in its own docstring.

Criterion 4 — False Adaptation Rate = 0

Met. 0 / 7. No DEFECT-labelled mutation was classified as safe to accept, including the three E-003 attacks (surface substitution, concurrent mechanical+defect, evidence starvation) and provenance laundering.

The other side of the trade is asserted too: 12 of 13 mechanical mutations are absorbed without a human. A classifier that escalated everything would score a perfect FAR and be worthless.

Gate verdict

Passed, on all four criteria. With one qualification that belongs in the same sentence: FAR = 0 follows largely from architecture — claims are run inputs, and SAFE_TO_ACCEPT is a closed two-element set — not from classifier accuracy. The experiment shows the architecture behaves as designed over 24 hand-written mutations. It says nothing about mutations nobody thought of.

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2. What the evidence changed

Three of the project's own claims were narrowed or corrected by building them. This is the part worth more than the green gate.

H-001 was narrowed (F-0005). Semantic actions do not generally outlast recorded interaction sequences. Where an application keeps stable identifiers, the two arms tie exactly — 9/9 against 9/9 — and the conventional approach is cheaper and deterministic. Semantic actions earn their keep only where identifiers are absent or not carried forward (2/3 against 0/3). The concept model presents this as a general superiority; it is conditional.

The classifier cannot infer intent (F-0006). The T02 design listed SEMANTIC_CHANGE as an outcome the decision table could produce. It cannot: a deliberate product decision and a defect are behaviourally identical, as M12 and M19 have asserted since T05. The two collapse into BEHAVIOUR_CHANGED and the distinction becomes a recorded human adjudication. Erring toward false alarm costs one review; erring toward false adaptation ends the project.

Crystallization's economic case is unmeasured (F-0007). The descendant is 54% cheaper than its ancestor, and that number must not be quoted in support of the thesis. The runtime is token-free by design, so the entire saving is one page fetch, one parse and a two-candidate scoring pass. The saving the concept actually claims — model tokens, latency, retry variance — is absent from the measurement.

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3. The compression pass

Which concepts have no supporting evidence?

Temperature, Confidence, Campaign, Metabolism, Retirement — declared, unimplemented, never consulted by any decision.

Temperature is the decidable one and is now F-0008. Crystallization was built and demonstrated without it: what triggered freezing was measured stability of realization, which is observed rather than declared. A declared temperature is a claim nobody verifies, and the project's own first heuristic argues against it. Not deleted yet — two unevidenced cases for keeping it are recorded — but gated: if the next workplan completes without a decision consulting it, it goes.

Which implementation abstractions have no conceptual justification?

Removed at T10:

Removed	Why
Verdict.SUSPICIOUS	No oracle could produce it. A verdict nothing can emit is a promise not kept.
Step.expect_refusal	Never set by any scenario. Speculative generality.
ActorIsolationError	Declared, never raised, never caught.
World.seed	Written at T04, never read. Replay comes from rebuilding the lab.
EvidencePack.latest()	Never called.
Trajectory.method	Computed on every capture, never read.

Which metadata has not informed a decision?

EnergyEvent history. Events have been recorded since T04 and have informed nothing — as designed, since H-005 is dormant. Capture is retained because history cannot be reconstructed later while scores always can, but this is now on the same gate as Temperature: if the next workplan ends with no decision having used it, the module goes.

Which agentic behaviour can now be deterministic?

The grant_access realization, and it has been — that is T09. Nothing else in the spike is agentic.

What have the experiments falsified?

Nothing outright. Two claims were narrowed (H-001, and the classifier's output space), and one criterion was met in a sense too weak to support the thesis (H-003's cost clause). No hypothesis was rejected, and none was promoted past EXPERIMENTING: 24 hand-written mutations is a small, self-chosen sample.

Two outcomes that had never run

INTENT_CHANGED and REALIZATION_FAILED were declared at T08 and produced by no test. Code that has never run is code nobody has checked. Rather than delete meaningful outcomes or trust them untested, both now have purpose-built cases, and test_no_classification_is_unreachable fails if a seventh is ever added without one.

Building the REALIZATION_FAILED case clarified a boundary worth keeping: a run that asserts nothing at all is AMBIGUOUS, not REALIZATION_FAILED — a use case with no claims cannot conclude anything, however well its steps ran.

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4. The fitness loop, closed

The milestone asks that a framework finding become a permanent guarantee rather than a note. F-0003 is resolved.

The finding: actor isolation left no trace in ordinary evidence. The self-test caught a shared memory store only because the harness planted per-actor secrets first. Isolation was a property of scenarios written to expose it, not of runs.

The fix: every Actor is seeded at construction with an automatic private marker, and the runner examines all actors on every scenario, recording the verdict as S3 evidence. Two regressions now stand behind it — test_every_run_records_a_verdict_on_isolation, and a self-check that catches a leak with the harness planting nothing at all.

Framework Finding (F-0003)
  → classified FRAMEWORK_LIMITATION
  → improvement hypothesis: automatic canaries make isolation observable
  → implemented at T10
  → permanent self-verification + deterministic regression
  → fitness map updated

That is the first complete Concept–Implementation Fitness Loop, which the milestones document calls the point at which the self-improvement system genuinely exists.

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5. Where this leaves the project

The thesis survived contact with its own evidence, in narrowed form. The distinctive claim — that verification can adapt to a changing surface without adapting to a defect — is demonstrated, and the demonstration is architectural rather than statistical, which is the stronger kind.

The single highest-value next step is a bounded live-model experiment. Two independent findings converge on it: M22 defeats the heuristic runtime while remaining solvable by reading a visible label (F-0005), and crystallization's economic case cannot be measured without token costs (F-0007). One experiment settles whether a model adds capability and whether crystallization has a product rationale. The RealizationMetrics fields were populated from the first run so that comparison is a subtraction rather than a re-run.

That should come before any further framework feature.

Open findings carried forward: F-0003 resolved · F-0004 (structural durability only; visual relayout untested) · F-0005 (H-001 narrowed) · F-0007 (cost unmeasurable; generated tests not fully standalone) · F-0008 (Temperature gated). The F-0001 residual — the taxonomy has no class for document-to-document drift — was considered and deliberately not resolved: adding a finding class to a taxonomy already larger than its evidence would be the opposite of compression.