The SKILL.md Agent Skills standard (agentskills.io) is now read natively by
Codex, Copilot, VS Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, opencode, Goose, Amp, Zed,
Factory, and ZeroClaw — so the portable move is not per-harness adapter
files (forked content that drifts) but one canonical skill placed where
each harness actually looks.
- Spec-compliant frontmatter: license, compatibility (the Linux-only
measurement story, stated up front), version/author/tags top-level
(ZeroClaw's runtime reads those; the spec ignores unknown fields).
reference/ renamed to references/ per the spec's conventional layout.
- .agents/skills/peltier/ mirror: the cross-tool convergence path (Codex,
Zed, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Copilot, opencode, Goose, Amp). Byte-identical
to the .claude canonical, enforced by CI — drift between the two copies
is a red build, not a footnote.
- AGENTS.md at the repo root for the ~20 harnesses that read it (Claude
Code does not; CLAUDE.md remains its file). Deliberately thin: it points
at CLAUDE.md and the skill instead of restating rules.
- scripts/install-skill.sh: stamps a consumer repo at both discovery paths
(--layout claude|agents|both), or emits a script-less --zeroclaw-variant.
ZeroClaw's skill security policy blocks script files by default
(skills.allow_scripts off) — its audit rejected the full skill and passes
the variant, verified against the real zeroclaw binary. The variant loses
nothing: preflight.sh still exists exactly once, in the peltier checkout
the skill already requires, and SKILL.md now documents running it from
there. Re-implementing preflight inline is named as a refusal condition.
- CI (skill-preflight): frontmatter upgraded to a full Agent Skills spec
conformance check on BOTH copies (name rules, dir match, description and
body limits, metadata string-map), plus mirror equality and a functional
installer test (both layouts identical to canonical, variant carries no
scripts/, nonexistent target refused).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The reusable artifact here was never the vendored targets — it is the
discipline: prove equivalence, prove significance, or claim nothing. This
packages it as a Claude Code skill usable from any repo.
Two modes. `verify` works anywhere, on any two shell commands in any
language: equivalence before timing -> A/A calibration -> interleaved A/B
with a bootstrap CI -> a verdict decided by the CI lower bound, never the
median. `attempt` drives the full in-repo loop (gates, pristine-baseline
verdict, ledger row, ROI report).
It drives the real bench-runner binary and refuses rather than degrade: on
an unsupported host, or with no trust layer reachable, preflight stops and
says so instead of falling back to a hand-rolled timing loop. A second copy
of the statistics is a second thing that can lie. A refusal ends the claim,
not the work.
An adversarial review of the skill caught six high-severity defects, all
fixed here — several of them the very errors the skill exists to prevent:
- verify mode had no risk classification at all. bench-runner emits only
accepted/rejected-bench; needs-human-review is minted by the in-repo
verdict path, which verify does not run. A concurrency change with
byte-identical output would have sailed through as "accepted". The skill
now makes the agent the classifier and says so explicitly.
- the accept template exposed `pin_prefix`, which is inert for
compare/aa/calibrate (only `verdict` reads it) — an agent would have set
it and reported pinning that never happened. Now documents wrapping both
sides in taskset instead.
- the equivalence gate compared stdout only, so two commands that write to
stderr and a dist/ tree would "GOLDEN PASS" on two empty files. Now hashes
stdout + stderr + exit code + artifact tree, and an empty diff over empty
output is a failed gate, not a passed one.
- nothing told the agent to build two coexisting immutable artifacts, so a
`cargo run` baseline could rebuild from the patched tree mid-bench — the
exact trap phase1-verdict-smoke-001 recorded.
- service mode was documented as generic HTTP. It is not: the server must
take <port> <doc> <iters>, print READY, and close the connection. A stock
Express app hangs the harness forever. Contract now stated.
- the CI refusal test could not pass: preflight also walks up from its own
location, so running it in-place found this very repo. The test now copies
the skill out of the tree first.
CI job `skill-preflight` asserts the contract that matters — resolve when a
trust layer is reachable, REFUSE when it is not, and work when consumed from
another repo via PELTIER_HOME. It deliberately does not assert a statistical
outcome: a shared runner is too noisy for that, which is precisely why the
skill calibrates before it claims.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <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
- 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
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
benbrownandClaude Fable 5
