Phase 5 write-up for the two SPEC §13 forks now that both are built:
- results/phase5/README.md — the full argument for each fork, with the
kernel-lane demo and learned-policy ranking tables and reproduce commands.
- results/phase5/learned-policy.txt — captured `cargo run -p policy` output
over the 34-row ledger.
- docs/src/research-forks.md — new mdBook chapter, wired into SUMMARY.md.
- docs/src/roadmap.md — Phase 5 row added; the Frontier section rewritten
from "out of scope" to "built, both routed to human review", with the
honest note that the actual GPU run needs GPU hardware absent here.
- CLAUDE.md — Phase 5 COMPLETE status paragraph.
No trust-layer or gate change; this is documentation of work already
committed (learned policy b7297ad, kernel lane 5abeb60).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
The parser/service targets only ever needed byte-identical golden replay.
The kernel lane is the case that breaks it: a matmul optimization
(transpose-B for cache locality + eight-accumulator ILP) that REORDERS the
floating-point reduction, so its low bits differ by construction —
byte-identical is the wrong gate.
Adds:
- EquivalencePolicy::compare + Divergence (diff-test): byte-identical is
exact; fp-tolerance tokenizes and compares numeric tokens within
abs + rel*|baseline|, with explicit NaN handling. Non-numeric tokens and
token-count mismatches still fail exactly.
- fp-compare bin: applies a target's equivalence.toml to two output files.
- targets/matmul/kernel.c: matmul_ref (single-accumulator oracle) vs
matmul_opt (reordered, faster), with emit/check/run/bench modes.
- targets/matmul/equivalence.toml: fp-tolerance abs 1e-4 + rel 1e-3.
- scripts/kernel-lane-demo.sh + results/phase5/kernel-lane.txt: byte-identical
FAILs, fp-tolerance is EQUIVALENT, a +0.5 perturbation is still REJECTED,
speedup 3.23× measured with the same interleaved A/B + bootstrap CI.
Ledger row phase5-matmul-opt = needs-human-review: using the FP-tolerance
tier at all is a human-review signal (SPEC §8), same posture as mimalloc.
The trust machinery is unchanged; only the timer and the gate differ, which
is exactly the shape a future GPU kernel would slot into.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
Human ruling on the needs-human-review allocator swap (+4.6%, CI
[+3.3%,+5.8%]): accepted as a real win for the measured comrak CLI
single-stream markdown-render workload, explicitly not a blanket
mimalloc mandate. Ledger row stays needs-human-review (append-only);
the ruling is documented in results/rulings/phase0-comrak-002.md and
reflected in the case study.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
Two defects found and fixed in a hostile review of the whole package:
1. The ROI report generator trusted the ledger verdict field and would
mint a clean $16,886/year report for phase2-comrak-010 — the
memory-leaking patch the audit overturned (immutably 'accepted' in the
append-only ledger, sanitizers_clean:false). report_row now exposes
sanitizers_clean and the report treats accepted-but-not-sanitizer-clean
as NOT shippable, printing a warning before any dollar figure. Legit
wins (sanitizers_clean:true) still render clean.
2. bench-runner service --rate 0 / --count 0 could panic via
from_secs_f64(1/0); run_session now guards finite/positive rate and
non-zero count/workers.
Attacks correctly refused (verified, no change): ledger UPDATE/DELETE,
propose_patch ../ + .git escapes, read_target_source traversal. All 10
accepted rows satisfy the green-gates + CI>=1.02 invariant. Findings
recorded in results/adversarial-review.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
phase4-cjson-service (ledger): the accepted batch win phase3-cjson-002
measured under a 150 rps coordinated-omission-correct replay (20 rounds,
40k requests, 0 drops). p50 latency +6.2%, 95% CI [+5.8%, +7.2%] —
accepted; p99 CI [0.07, 4.97] too noisy (single-worker loopback tail),
harness correctly rejected. ROI (500-core fleet, $0.04/core-hr): 27.5
cores / $9,621/year at the CI lower bound, report generated mechanically
(results/phase4/cjson-service-roi.md).
- results/phase4/: case study + README + the generated ROI report.
- CLAUDE.md: Phase 4 complete; Phases 0-4 all done.
All SPEC §5 exit criteria met across every phase; zero shipped false
accepts across the whole project.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
phase3-cjson-002 (class 5+3): stack-buffer number parsing + strtod
round-trip replacing sscanf. +8.85% median, 95% CI [+7.5%, +10.0%] on
the C target, banked. 100% audit: byte-identical golden replay,
independent ASan+UBSan clean, 10k-input differential fuzz 0 divergences,
patch bounds/free-gating verified by eye.
- verdict: an infrastructure sanitizer-BUILD failure (missing runtime,
broken toolchain) now caps the accept at needs-human-review and logs
it, instead of crashing the verdict and losing a measured bench.
- results/phase3/: four public case studies (tokei class-5 wins; build
flags + allocators; the comrak caught false-accept; the cJSON
cross-language proof) + README. Compound-speedup claim stated as an
approximation, not a measured figure (CIs don't multiply).
- .gitignore: cjson build-artifact dirs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
- coz wired (harness -DHOTPATH_COZ hook, scripts, just coz) + installed,
but the apt coz runtime aborts in its own init_coz/pthread_create
interposition on this glibc (known coz bug, reproduces on the pristine
binary). Documented in results/cjson/coz/README.md; callgrind cache-sim
is the working profiler.
- cjson no-op verdict smoke: full C pipeline flows (clang {out} baseline
rebuild, Unity/CTest + golden gates, interleaved bench) to a correct
null result (median 0.9995).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
~22% of Ir in glibc float serialization (__printf_fp, cJSON print_number)
and parsing (strtod/str_to_mpn, cJSON parse_number), plus parse_value/
parse_string and malloc/free churn. Ample headroom (SPEC §6).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
20/20 sessions: A/A false-positive rate 0.000 (<0.05 required),
injected-5%-slowdown detection 1.000 (>=0.95 required). The C workload
is a trusted measurement anchor; verdict benches on cjson are now valid.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
20 audited attempts, 0 shipped false accepts, 3 verified auto-accepted
wins (tokei class-5: +10.7%, +3.7%, +9.9%; ~1.25x vs upstream with
Phase-0 wins). Independent 20-way adversarial re-audit (phase2-final-audit
workflow) confirmed every verdict follows its evidence, correct
equivalence tier, no harness-gaming, ledger append-only intact.
Closeout changes:
- case study: full 20-row attempt table, scoreboard, corrected
comrak-010 CI upper bound (+12.1%, was +12.2%), exit-criteria section
flipped to ALL MET, OS-isolation gap marked closed.
- CLAUDE.md Current-phase line: Phase 2 complete, next Phase 3.
- verdict: derive the ledger 'phase' column from the run_id namespace
(phaseN-*) instead of the hardcoded 1 the re-audit flagged; historical
rows are immutable and stay as written (run_id prefix is authoritative).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
The pipeline auto-accepted an LSan-flagged teardown patch (+10.7%
median) because ASan/LSan were per-attempt manual; the 100% audit
overturned it (black_box liveness ends at scope close, process::exit
runs after — 384-byte arena chunk unreachable at exit). verdict now
builds the patched tree with ASan+LSan and runs the pinned workload on
every would-be accept, capping flagged wins at needs-human-review per
SPEC §8. Shipped false accepts remain 0; the win was not banked; case
study carries the corrective record.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
Class 5 on tokei: forward-only all-whitespace break test replaces
trim().is_empty() (drops the redundant rposition scan per processed
byte). Median 1.0367, 95% CI [1.027, 1.052]. Equivalence eyeball done
(same AsciiExt::is_whitespace predicate, empty-window case identical);
diff-fuzz + ASan running before the win is counted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
- propose_patch allows the /dev/null headers git emits for new/deleted
files (previously every new-file diff was refused as an absolute path).
- read_target_source serves HEAD (pristine) content instead of the
working tree, matching propose_patch's standalone-vs-pristine base so
post-proposal reads can't drift a later diff's context lines.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
The agent's parse_context skip-scan passed upstream tests but broke
byte-identical golden replay on the pinned corpus; bench correctly never
ran. First rejected-gate of the grind: the equivalence stack blocking a
wrong-output patch that a green test suite would have shipped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
- Standalone-proposal semantics: workspace resets to pristine before
every apply, so probe patches can't accumulate into a tested tree the
ledger's patch field doesn't describe.
- Friendly errors: explicit trailing-newline check, and git apply's
stderr relayed on refusal instead of a generic message.
- Tool docs + task prompt updated to match.
- phase2-comrak-004 audited: honest rejected-bench (median 1.0124,
CI [1.0011, 1.0267] — real but under the 2% bar), Mutex pre-flagged
for human review, cumulative-probe state disclosed in the hypothesis.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
Ledger row: class 5 (algorithmic) on tokei, first-byte gate table for
the per-byte token matchers in perform_multi_line_analysis.
Speedup median 1.107, 95% CI [1.084, 1.131] vs the banked-wins baseline,
workload: 221 MB / 4360 files, single rayon thread, pinned core.
Manual audit gates (pipeline covers tests+golden+bench only):
- Differential fuzz, 10k mutated inputs across 200 batched runs:
0 divergences after canonicalizing tokei's benign parallel-walker
output ordering (present in pristine baseline; counts identical).
Fuzzer added as scripts/diff-fuzz-tokei.py.
- ASan run recorded in the case study (next commit).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
Mechanically re-checks a ledger row against the accept rule (CI lower
bound vs threshold, gate greenness, patch path allowlist) and prints
the full evidence for the human part of the 100% Phase 2 audit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
- Profiles regenerated with callgrind --cache-sim --branch-sim for both
targets: per-function D1/LL miss and branch-mispredict columns unlock
playbook class-4 preconditions (comrak: syntect write_highlighted owns
31% of D1 read misses; tokei: parse_lines owns 56% of Ir).
- tokei workspace: accepted Phase 0 wins banked as a local commit so
stash-based baseline rebuilds attribute only the marginal patch to new
attempts (false-accept trap closed before grinding).
- read_ledger now returns per-attempt history (class, hotspot,
hypothesis, verdict): a class may be re-entered with a materially new
hypothesis, never a duplicate one. Task prompt updated to match.
- read_verdict long-polls the ledger up to 45s server-side (under the
60s MCP cap), cutting the agent's polling turn burn ~15x.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
The Claude Agent SDK loop (agent/hotpath_agent/loop.py, model
claude-fable-5) drives the seven harness tools over a standalone stdio
MCP server (mcp_server.py) and runs the full profile -> hypothesize ->
patch -> gated-verdict cycle on comrak with no human in the loop.
Three audited attempts, all honest rejections, ZERO false accepts:
- phase2-comrak-001 class 3: syntect buffer with_capacity, [0.971,1.007]
- phase2-comrak-002 class 5: gate dead VecDeque build, [0.982,1.026]
- phase2-comrak-003 class 6: hoist find_special_char check, [0.970,1.007]
The agent picked the cheapest untried class each time (3->5->6) and
TWICE refused to fabricate a verdict it couldn't read back, verifying
ledger integrity instead — the anti-reward-hacking behavior SPEC §10
targets.
Harness changes surfaced by the loop:
- run_verdict is now async: launches the multi-minute build+bench
detached (past the 60s MCP transport cap) and returns immediately;
new read_verdict op polls the append-only ledger row (ledger
verdict_summary). Fixes attempt 001's unreadable-verdict gap.
- read_target_source takes offset/limit line windows so 100KB+ files
page instead of overflowing — removes the agent's reason to reach for
a shell (attempt 003 paged a 2400-line file cleanly, no shell).
Honest boundary note (case study + code comments): in THIS dev
container the SDK tool allow/deny layer is defense-in-depth, not the
trust boundary — a nested CLI as root under a parent session doesn't
reliably gate built-ins. SPEC §10's boundary is OS process/user
isolation; that hardening is the remaining Phase 2 exit item
(docs/infra.md). What holds regardless: propose_patch is the only
mediated write path (path-allowlist + git apply) and the ledger is
append-only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
Full-protocol calibration on a GitHub-hosted runner: A/A false-positive
0/20, injected-5%-slowdown detection 20/20, per-session CIs transcribed
with run provenance (artifacts expire; the md is the durable record).
With the local-container anchor and gates running end-to-end on both
targets in CI, all SPEC §5 Phase 1 exit criteria are met on free
infrastructure. CLAUDE.md phase line moved to Phase 2 (agent);
dedicated pinned hardware remains listed in docs/infra.md as the bar
for Phase 3/4 customer-facing case studies.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
The agent's only door to the trust layer (SPEC 3.5, 10): harnessd
serves read_profile, read_ledger, read_playbook, read_target_source,
propose_patch, run_verdict over stdio JSON lines. propose_patch
enforces the path allowlist (relative paths only, no parent
components, no .git, target name validated) before git apply --check
+ apply rooted in the target workspace; run_verdict builds the
candidate into an isolated dir and hands off to the verdict pipeline
(pristine-rebuilt baseline included). Python client
(agent/hotpath_agent/harness.py) + tools.py rewired from stubs to
live calls.
E2E evidence: escape attempts refused (bad target name, ../ paths,
trust-layer diff touching config/accept.toml rejected before any
apply); benign doc patch applied, candidate built, full verdict ran
mechanically end to end -> +8.9% [1.079, 1.104] accepted (ship-tree
patches ride along as the candidate), ledger row phase1-ipc-smoke-001.
Phase 1 caveat recorded in the daemon header: same-uid filesystem
read-only enforcement still needs the separate-user/container setup.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
Adds crates/verdict ('just verdict'): runs the core gates on the
candidate binary, then an interleaved A/B bench vs the baseline with
the CI-lower-bound rule, and writes the append-only ledger row with
per-side median CIs, workload statement, and env fingerprint. Gate
failure short-circuits to rejected-gate; --needs-human-review caps an
accepted verdict (never upgrades). CPU pinning moves into accept.toml
(pin_prefix, machine-specific, applied to both sides identically).
The smoke test caught a real trust gap: pointing --baseline-bin at the
workspace build (phase1-verdict-smoke-001) measured patched-vs-patched
and returned null, because gate runs rebuild the workspace binary from
the patched tree. Fix: --rebuild-baseline stashes the patch, builds
the baseline into isolated targets/<name>/baseline/, and restores the
patch — SPEC 3.1's pristine-checkout rule, now enforced by the
harness. Re-run (phase1-verdict-smoke-002) reproduces the Phase 0
result mechanically: +10.4% median, 95% CI [1.0932, 1.1137], accepted.
Both smoke rows are in the ledger, including the null one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
Adds 'bench-runner calibrate': N A/A sessions counted against a <5%
false-positive bar, and N sessions with a synthetic slowdown injected
as a real busy-wait inside the candidate's timed window, counted
against a >=95% detection bar (detected = ratio CI entirely below 1.0).
Bootstrap seed varies per session so resampling noise is not
correlated across the very statistic being validated. JSON evidence
includes per-session CIs, injected wait, acceptance verdict, and env
fingerprint.
First run against the real comrak workload (20+20 sessions, pinned
core): false-positive rate 0.000, detection rate 0.950 -> PASS.
Evidence: results/calibration/2026-07-06-comrak-full-calibration.json.
Closes the SPEC 3.1 acceptance-criteria gap; remaining Phase 1 gaps:
no-net containers, perf profiling, diff-test orchestration, agent IPC.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
Attempt 4 (phase0-tokei-002, class 3, ACCEPTED — first auto-accept):
every file was read through encoding_rs_io's DecodeReaderBytes via
generic read_to_end, which zero-fills every grown buffer chunk (~221MB
memset/run, 8.5% of Ir) and grows without a size hint. Patch: fs::read
with a BOM-gated fallback to the identical decode path (a UTF-8-BOM
file transcodes invalid sequences, so the fallback is required for
equivalence). Gates: golden byte-identical; differential fuzz old-vs-
new binaries 4,332 iterations (BOM grid, invalid UTF-8, binary junk,
randomized) zero divergence; 250 upstream tests green; ASan+LSan clean
with ASan-run output hashing to golden. Bench: +9.9% [8.0%, 12.7%].
Attempt 5 (phase0-tokei-003, ship tree, ACCEPTED): stacks fat LTO+cgu=1
(real +1.6% standalone but under threshold, phase0-tokei-001) on the
accepted patch; benched as a whole vs pristine: +10.4% [8.5%, 12.0%].
Median clears the Phase 0 exit bar; CI lower bound 8.5%.
Case study written (results/phase0/case-study-tokei.md), ledger at 5
attempts, CLAUDE.md phase line moved to Phase 1, next hypotheses
logged (tokei class-5 byte-skip table; comrak class-3 arena).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
Commit the spec and scaffold the system it describes:
- SPEC.md: the full v0.1 engineering spec
- crates/: trust-layer Rust workspace, unit-tested
- bench-runner: interleaved ABAB scheduling with discarded warm-ups,
deterministic bootstrap CIs over the ratio of medians,
CI-lower-bound accept rule, env fingerprinting, and a CLI with
compare + A/A self-test modes (A/A verified passing end-to-end)
- diff-test: gate outcome model, sha256 corpus pin verifier that
refuses on mismatch, per-target equivalence policy parser
(byte-identical default, explicit fp-tolerance opt-in)
- ledger: append-only SQLite attempt schema with UPDATE/DELETE
refused by triggers, anti-double-attempt query
- report: cores-saved and dollars/yr ROI math over speedup CIs,
pricing.toml inputs
- playbook/: classes 1-7 with preconditions, procedure, verification
notes, and known failure modes per class
- agent/: Python package skeleton — six-tool contract and prompting
spine, harness IPC deferred to Phase 1
- config/: accept.toml (2% threshold, 30 runs/side), pricing.toml
- targets/, corpora/, results/calibration/: layout and policy docs
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
Claude