Addresses the CRITICAL/HIGH/MED findings from the brutal-honesty review of the
learning-integrity cluster. The theme: the machinery was real but several claims
outran the evidence. This makes the claims honest and the evidence falsifiable.
CRIT-1 / HIGH-3 (flywheel gated vapor / toy anchor can't move):
- verification/anchors/qe-anchor-v2.json — 5 oracle-verified DISCRIMINATING items
(13 mutants), each with a trap edge a happy-path test misses, so the anchor CAN
actually move. v1's items were too easy to discriminate a retrieval effect.
- scripts/coupling-experiment.ts — falsifiable NONE/IRRELEVANT/RELEVANT controlled
test (N reps, temp>0, $0 mutation-oracle grading). Live run remains blocked on
model availability; the harness refuses to fabricate a verdict.
CRIT-2 (DoE "stats" were a range proxy):
- scripts/doe-run.ts — N real replicates of a FIXED item at temp=0.6 (was 5
different items x1 at temp=0), per-replicate seed, plus a deterministic $0 --stub.
- scripts/doe-aggregate.mjs — real main-effects factorial ANOVA: within-cell error
term, F-test via dependency-free regularized incomplete beta; beads verdict now
gates on p<0.05, not an eyeballed mean delta.
- tests/unit/scripts/doe-aggregate.test.ts — F-CDF + incomplete-beta vs closed
forms/R, planted-effect recovery (p<0.001), null factor (p>0.5), unbalanced cells.
HIGH-4 / MED-6 (over-claimed gate guarantees):
- ADR-120 gains a "Threat model and limits (honest)" section: gateReExecutes
catches a lying log, not a buggy gate (same-process seal+rule).
- ADR-118 status reframed to "infrastructure awaiting a validated signal."
- tests/unit/validation/rule-consistency.test.ts — property test scoping what the
gate actually guarantees (determinism, stable fingerprints, flipped-verdict).
- DOE-HARNESS-SCREEN-DESIGN.md — unequal-n note.
HIGH-5 / MED-7 (self-fulfilling test / brittle scripts):
- tests/unit/learning/mmr-scaling.test.ts — FALSIFIABLE regression for the real
O(n^4) scoreHeldOut hang the MMR_POOL_SIZE cap fixed (96s->420ms at n=300).
- coupled-anchor.test.ts de-faked: relabeled as a MECHANISM/wiring test, documents
that the scripted generator hardcodes the outcome and the real model was an
honest null — no longer readable as evidence that coupling helps.
- tests/unit/validation/sealed-hash-roundtrip.test.ts — regression for the
canonicalJson undefined-key seal bug.
Verification: tsc 0 errors; 33/33 new remediation tests + 290/290 full
validation+flywheel cluster green. No live model run (Ollama offline + Anthropic
account at usage limit) — coupling live-validation surfaced as the one honest
open item, not faked.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adopts the receipt-gated self-improvement discipline from the 2026-07 cross-repo
analysis of ruflo (flywheel), MetaHarness (gateReExecutes), and retort (two-gate
spec conformance + DoE). All DI'd and unit-tested (178 tests); run end-to-end on
real qe_patterns; every limitation honestly scoped.
- ADR-117 frozen oracle anchor: hash-pinned, constant-denominator eval set that
no promotion may regress; loader throws on drift (verification/anchors/qe-anchor-v1.json).
- ADR-118 receipt-gated QE-policy flywheel: generational loop over qe_patterns,
conjunctive frozen accept(), Ed25519-signed receipts + compounding lineage,
durable persistence (flywheel_receipts), corpus + semantic-retriever coupling.
- ADR-119 two-gate quality verdicts: mechanical gate + frontier judge, three-valued
(pass/fail/inconclusive) with preflight; new `aqe quality-gate` CLI + `qe/quality/gate` MCP tool.
- ADR-120 gateReExecutes: re-execute a versioned frozen rule on sealed inputs;
catches the A8-EXT forged-promote class; retrofit onto pattern-promote + dream-apply.
- ADR-121 provenance tiers: only oracle:test-exec evidence changes fleet behavior;
additive, conservative-backfill migration.
- ADR-122 DoE screen: model x prompt x retrieval x scaffold, run on real data
(25/27 cells, $1.25) — scaffolding (esp. reflexion) and retrieval degrade
reliability (the retort `beads` signature); simplest+cheapest stack wins.
- safe-db: AQE_DISABLE_WAL / AQE_JOURNAL_MODE env-gate (macOS virtiofs bind-mount
WAL corruption mitigation; default behavior unchanged).
Honest nulls documented: the flywheel lift is on a self-supervised proxy with the
anchor held flat; making the coupled anchor move needs harder items + a relevant
corpus (an ADR-117 re-freeze), not a retriever change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Dragan Spiridonov