The two halves of the system run on opposite statistical philosophies, on
purpose, and until now the docs never said so. The optimizer is a Bayesian
detective: playbook prior, ledger evidence, policy ranking, explain
feedback — belief-updating that decides what to try next. The trust layer
is a frequentist court: equivalence gates, per-machine calibrated error
rates (A/A false-positive bound, injected-regression power bound), and a
CI-lower-bound accept rule with no prior anywhere on the accept path —
because its audience is a hostile reviewer who shares none of your priors.
The load-bearing edge is the return path: evidence flows from court to
detective (ledger rows + explain); authority never flows the other way.
Invariant, now stated in four places: priors steer where we look; they
never touch what we conclude. A wrong prior costs compute — each wasted
attempt honestly ledgered. A prior in the verdict would cost a false
claim, the one unrecoverable failure for a project whose product is trust.
- thesis.md: full section with the two-box diagram incl. the return edge,
in docket order (equivalence before measurement); notes that estimated
payoff is a belief and dollar figures are minted only by the mechanical
report from accepted rows, and that even the learning layer bets on
Wilson LOWER bounds — the detective is a pessimist too.
- README: the one-breath version, linking the full argument.
- SPEC §1: dated note mapping each half to its sections.
- CLAUDE.md: the mental model, one paragraph under Mission.
Framing credit: emerged from a design conversation on whether peltier is
"Bayesian engineering" — it is exactly half of one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Verdicts say what; nothing said why. A rejection that reads only
rejected-bench teaches nothing, and the loop's compounding value is that
the next hypothesis is better than the last. This ships the teaching layer,
built so it can never contaminate the thing it explains.
New crate crates/explain (`just explain <run-id>`):
- Advisory, strictly off the accept path: runs after the verdict is
recorded; nothing it emits feeds gates, bench, verdict, or ledger. Not
agent-facing: harnessd stays at seven ops, by design (SPEC §3.7 says why
- better hypotheses must never become a feedback channel into
measurement).
- Ledger-only inputs, deterministic: consumes exactly one row via the new
ledger::attempt_row; no config, no clock, no re-benching. Identical row,
byte-identical text - proven live (cmp on two runs of a real row).
- Record vs inference is typographic: restatements print plain; anything
beyond is prefixed `inference:` so an explanation can never be quoted as
a measurement.
- The narrative must agree with the machine verdict. The first live run
caught this class of bug: an accepted row without a recorded threshold
was narrated as "a policy rejection" two lines under "verdict: accepted".
Accepted rows are now always described by their CI lower bound (the
defensible claim); rejected-bench rows classify against 1.0 (measured
regression / null result / real-but-below-bar); NHR rows name the
recorded cap and state the numbers were not the deciding factor;
rejected-gate rows name the failing gate. Regression-tested.
- Historical rows are flagged, not laundered: accepted with
sanitizers_clean=false prints the doctrine caution (comrak-010 shows it);
fuzz_iters=0 accepts are named pre-integration rows.
verdict now records accept_threshold (the bar in force for that run) into
the bench env fingerprint, so rows are self-contained going forward -
explain never substitutes today's config for a historical bar, and says so
on older rows instead.
SPEC §3.7 (Added 2026-07-20) carries the invariants; book chapter
docs/src/explain.md shows real output from real rows (the accepted cJSON
win, the caught false-accept, the kernel-lane NHR); CLAUDE.md, README,
justfile, and the architecture layout updated (the layout also gains the
previously-omitted crates/policy line).
Verified: 21 workspace test suites green (6 new explain tests incl.
determinism and verdict-narrative agreement), clippy -D warnings clean,
fmt clean, mdbook builds, live runs against phase3-cjson-002,
phase5-matmul-opt, phase2-comrak-010, and phase4-cjson-service.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
On a Windows host the preflight's job is to deliver a structured refusal
(measurement is Linux/POSIX-only). But a Windows-native harness with no
POSIX shell never got that far: preflight.sh fails to LAUNCH, and an agent
staring at "sh: not found" is exactly the agent that hand-rolls a timing
loop. The refusal doctrine has to be as portable as the skill.
- scripts/preflight.ps1: faithful port of the preflight contract, runs on
Windows PowerShell 5.1 and pwsh 7+ on any OS. Host check first (so
Windows refuses before touching anything), same walk-up resolution, same
always-build rule, same key=value output, same exit codes. The source is
pure ASCII with the shared em dashes composed at runtime — Windows
PowerShell 5.1 misdecodes BOM-less UTF-8, and that exact bug class
already bit this machine once (the francis-watchdog parse failure).
- Two implementations of one contract is a drift risk, so it is gated like
every other claim in this repo: the skill-preflight CI job now runs BOTH
scripts on the same ubuntu host and byte-diffs their stdout on all three
paths (in-checkout resolve, no-checkout refusal, PELTIER_HOME from a
foreign repo). Disagreement is a red build, not a footnote.
- New skill-preflight-windows job (windows-latest): asserts the native
refusal end-to-end under Windows PowerShell 5.1 AND pwsh (STATUS=refuse,
nonzero exit, the 'unsupported host' reason), plus Git Bash sh for good
measure. Verified live on a real Windows 11 box before shipping: 5.1
parses the pure-ASCII source clean and refuses with exit 1.
- SKILL.md / references/verify.md: document the second entry point ("use
whichever your host can launch; never both, never neither"); book chapter
and CLAUDE.md updated to match. .agents mirror regenerated (identical).
The ZeroClaw variant is unaffected: rm -rf scripts/ drops the ps1 too,
and its audit still passes (7 files scanned).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The cross-harness skill shipped (PR #17/#19) with README/CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md
coverage, but the mdBook — the public disclosure surface — had zero mention
of it. By this project's own standard that is a parity defect: the flagship
consumable feature was undocumented where it is disclosed.
- New chapter "Consume it: the peltier skill" (docs/src/skill.md): install
paths and the harness matrix, the ZeroClaw script-blocking variant, the
gate order verify mode enforces, the refusal doctrine, and exactly which
of these claims CI asserts. Numbers carry their CI and workload.
- SUMMARY.md, architecture.md (layout now lists the skill + mirror),
reproduce.md, introduction.md: cross-links to the chapter.
- docs.yml: pull requests now BUILD the book (never deploy) — a broken
chapter or dangling include is a red PR check, not a post-merge surprise.
Also closes an audit finding: the book rebuilds when results/** changes,
since case-study chapters {{#include}} evidence files from there.
Book build verified locally with mdbook 0.4.x (skill.html renders).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
An adversarial audit found the enforcement story ahead of the code: gates
that were documented as hard gates were advisory, manual, or absent, and
several human-facing claims outran the machine record. This makes the
claims true.
High findings
- Differential fuzz was documentation, not enforcement: verdict hardcoded
fuzz_iters=0 and diff-test hardcoded the gate to Skipped, while the case
studies claimed 10k-iteration fuzz on the same wins. Fuzz is now a real
pipeline gate (strict FUZZ-RESULT contract, executed count recorded), and
it is inherently baseline-vs-candidate, so it runs on the accept path and
reports Skipped in the standalone `just gates` flow. New hard rule: a
machine `accepted` verdict is impossible unless the fuzz gate actually
passed — otherwise it caps at needs-human-review.
- The agent's system prompt claimed FP/concurrency/unsafe patches were
"routed to human review automatically". No such mechanism existed. Added
a conservative lexical risk classifier (crates/verdict/src/risk.rs) that
forces needs-human-review on any would-be accept carrying those signals;
fp-tolerance equivalence always signals.
- The local verdict path ran agent-influenced code unsandboxed. It now runs
under scripts/no-net.sh (network namespace) and fails closed. Upstream
test suites are hash-verified against corpora/<t>/TESTSUITE.sha256 when
present (scripts/pin-testsuite.sh generates them).
Also fixed, found while fixing the above
- The pipeline script's `set -e` was inert (brace group as the left operand
of `&&`), so a failing candidate build did not abort the run and verdict
could bench a stale binary. Now a scoped subshell whose status is branched
on at top level.
- A wrapper that exits before exec'ing (no-net.sh refusing, bad wrapper path)
stranded RUNNING.lock and left read_verdict polling forever. Failure
accounting now lives outside the wrapper.
- harnessd's patch allowlist ignored git rename/copy headers and --no-prefix
diffs; the rename-escape case is now a committed regression test.
- The workspace did not compile on Windows (ungated Unix APIs). cfg-gated;
71 portable tests now run on both platforms.
- pin-check regenerated the corpus manifest instead of verifying it; it is
now verify-only, with a deliberate `just pin-corpus` to re-pin.
- Max RSS is captured per run on Unix; PMU counters are opt-in diagnostics
(compare --perf-stat), never part of the accept decision.
Docs now match the code, including what is NOT yet enforced: no target ships
a TESTSUITE.sha256 pin, no target declares [build].tsan, and matmul is not
wired to the fp-tolerance gate — each is stated as mechanized-but-inert
rather than done. Corrected the stale "33 ledger rows" (34), the playbook's
class-3 cJSON win (rejected), adversarial-review.md's sanitizer-separation
claim (five accepted rows carry sanitizers_clean=false), the unsupported
"40,000 requests" figure, and the blanket "historical rows record
fuzz_iters=0" (8 of 10; phase0-tokei-002/-003 record 4,332).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The project ships as peltier.io; "hotpath" was the placeholder working name
(CLAUDE.md: "Rename freely; nothing depends on it"). Replaces the product
name in the README front page and every mdBook source chapter — book title,
nav header, and prose ("Peltier profiles…", "Peltier sells…") — plus the
theme CSS comment.
The metaphor is unchanged (a Peltier device is a thermoelectric cooler:
"spot cooling for hot paths"), and the literal noun phrase "hot paths"
stays. Two code identifiers are intentionally left as-is because they are
not prose: the `agent/hotpath_agent/` Python module path and the
`HOTPATH_ISOLATION` env var — renaming those is a code change, not a docs
one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
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
- docs/: an mdBook documentation site — thesis, architecture, measurement
discipline, equivalence gates, agent loop, isolation/anti-reward-hacking,
playbook, ROI, reproduce, roadmap, and the five case studies (pulled from
their single source in results/ via {{#include}}). Builds clean (21
pages).
- .github/workflows/docs.yml: builds mdBook and deploys to GitHub Pages on
push to main (one-time setup: Settings → Pages → Source = GitHub Actions).
- README.md: rewritten as the project front page — the thesis, the verified
results table, layout, quick start, how it stays honest, links to the
book. Replaces the stale Phase-0-era text.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
harnessd gains --socket mode (Unix socket, trusted uid, mutating ops
serialized); the harness client speaks socket when
HOTPATH_HARNESS_SOCKET is set. scripts/agent-isolated.sh launches an
attempt with the agent tree confined — mountns mode (repo bind-mounted
read-only, CAP_SYS_ADMIN/CAP_SYS_PTRACE dropped; no credential copying)
or user mode (unprivileged hpagent, bench-metal shape).
scripts/isolation-check.sh + just isolation-check verify the boundary
from the agent's side: 19 checks, both modes, all passing — repo
writes, forged ledger INSERTs, trust-binary replacement, rw remounts,
and userns re-entry all refused; the harnessd socket door works.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
Closes the CI-reachable slice of the Phase 1 infra gaps:
- trust-layer job: cargo test + clippy -D warnings + fmt
- target-gates-no-net: fetches pinned targets (new targets/fetch.sh),
regenerates + verifies corpora, runs 'just gates tokei'
mechanically, and executes the bench workload inside a
--network=none container (SPEC 3.1/10 no-net requirement)
- runner-calibration (informational): A/A + injection harness measures
the shared runner's noise floor per run, evidence uploaded as an
artifact — environments are judged empirically, not assumed
- perf-probe (informational): reports which perf event sources work
docs/infra.md maps each remaining hardware requirement (pinned cores,
governor/SMT control, separate-uid trust layer) to the bench-metal
self-hosted runner setup a human can complete in ~15 min.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
benbrownandClaude Fable 5