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benbrownandClaude Opus 4.8 af3fc3dccd skill: expose the trust layer as a consumable peltier skill
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>
2026-07-14 13:39:38 -04:00

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# attempt — the full loop, inside a peltier checkout
Profile → hypothesize → patch → gated verdict → ledger row. This mode only
applies when you are working **inside a peltier checkout** on a target that has
a `targets/<name>/target.toml`. Everywhere else, use
[verify.md](verify.md).
Requires Linux (harnessd uses Unix sockets and `setsid`; every gate shells
through `sh`).
## Before you touch anything
**Read the ledger first.** It records every attempt ever made on this target,
including the failures — which is exactly what stops you re-running a dead
end:
cargo run -p policy # ranks playbook classes by their evidence
`policy` reads the ledger and ranks optimization classes by the Wilson lower
bound of their shippable-win rate. It is **advisory** — a learned prior over
the fixed cheapest-first order. The gates still decide every verdict.
**Then respect the order.** Cheapest wins first: build flags → LTO → PGO →
allocator swap → *then* code changes. Do not hand-write SIMD before trying
`-O3`. The playbook (`playbook/`) has the preconditions and known risks for
each class.
## The boundary you may not cross
The agent may modify **only** allowlisted paths under `targets/<name>/`.
`crates/`, `config/`, `corpora/`, and the upstream test suites are read-only:
the thing being measured does not get to grade itself. `harnessd` enforces
this on every proposed diff (path allowlist over every diff header, including
`rename`/`copy` — a patch that tries to escape is rejected, not sanitized).
## Log the hypothesis *before* patching
A hypothesis written after seeing the numbers is not a hypothesis. State what
you think is slow, why, and what you expect the change to buy — then patch.
## Run the gates
just gates <target>
Corpus pin → test-suite pin (when `corpora/<t>/TESTSUITE.sha256` exists) →
upstream tests → golden replay. Note what this **does not** do: differential
fuzz needs a pristine baseline to differ against, so it reports `Skipped` here
and runs for real on the accept path below. `just gates` is a fast equivalence
check, not a fuzz run — do not report it as one.
## The verdict — the only thing that can accept a change
just verdict <target> <candidate-bin> <run-id> <class> "<hypothesis>" "<hotspot>" \
--patch-file <diff>
This rebuilds a **pristine baseline** from the pinned upstream commit (not
whatever is lying around in your tree), runs the full gate set against the
candidate, benches interleaved A/B against that baseline, and writes one
append-only ledger row with the verdict and the complete evidence.
It will refuse to hand you an `accepted` unless:
- the upstream test suite is green **and** golden replay is byte-identical (or
within the target's declared FP tolerance);
- the **differential-fuzz gate actually passed** — a real run reporting zero
divergences. No fuzz run, no machine accept. Ever;
- ASan/UBSan are clean (and TSan, when the target configures it);
- the bootstrap 95% CI lower bound of the speedup clears the threshold in
`config/accept.toml` (default 2%);
- and a conservative lexical risk classifier finds **no** concurrency, unsafe,
or floating-point signals in the patch. If it does, the verdict is capped at
`needs-human-review` no matter how good the numbers are.
Any of these failing produces a rejected row. **That is a complete, valid
outcome** — the row is the deliverable. Write it and move on. Do not iterate on
a rejected patch more than twice without a genuinely new hypothesis.
## Report
just report <run-id>
Mechanically generates the ROI from the ledger row: throughput → cores →
dollars, and/or latency percentiles — every figure with its CI, workload, and
methodology printed inline. It flags any row that was not accepted, so a
rejected attempt cannot be laundered into a dollar figure.
## Unattended
just agent-attempt <target> <run-id>
Runs one full attempt behind the OS boundary: `harnessd` as the trusted uid on
a Unix socket, the agent loop as an unprivileged user, the verdict pipeline
wrapped in a network namespace (`scripts/no-net.sh`) that **fails closed** — if
namespaces are unavailable it refuses to run rather than quietly running with
the network up. `just isolation-check` verifies the boundary from the agent's
side.
## When the numbers are good and the change is scary
FP-ordering, concurrency primitives, anything UB-adjacent: `needs-human-review`,
always, regardless of the speedup. This is not a formality. The one false
accept in peltier's history (`phase2-comrak-010`) passed its bench and was
caught by a human audit afterwards — which is precisely why the sanitizer lane
is now machine-enforced and why this rule does not bend.