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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>
119 lines
5.6 KiB
Markdown
119 lines
5.6 KiB
Markdown
# peltier.io
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> Spot cooling for hot paths. A profile-guided optimization agent that
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> only ships wins it can prove.
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peltier.io profiles real binaries and services, isolates hot paths, proposes
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optimizations, and accepts a change **only** when two independent bars are
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cleared: **behavioral equivalence** (upstream tests + byte-identical golden
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replay + differential fuzzing + sanitizers) and **statistical significance**
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(the speedup's bootstrap 95% CI lower bound clears a threshold on
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calibrated hardware). A change without both is discarded and logged.
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Consultants sell surveys; compilers sell flags. Peltier sells **verified
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deltas with the methodology attached** — a stopwatch on pinned hardware, a
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proof of equivalence, and an ROI figure whose confidence interval survives
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hostile review.
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📖 **Full documentation: the [peltier.io book](https://bdbrown4.github.io/peltier.io/)**
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· Design spec: [SPEC.md](SPEC.md) · Charter: [CLAUDE.md](CLAUDE.md)
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## Verified results
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Every number carries its 95% CI and its workload, and every one survived the
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gates above. Across **five phases and 34 ledger rows, zero shipped false
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accepts** — including two pipeline over-accepts the audit caught before
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anything shipped, each becoming a permanent new gate.
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| Target | Win | Verified |
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|---|---|---|
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| tokei (Rust) — LTO (class 1) | +10.4% | CI [+8.5%, +12.0%] |
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| tokei — three class-5 algorithmic wins | +10.7% / +3.7% / +9.9% | each CI-significant |
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| cJSON (C) — number-handling rewrite (class 5) | +8.85% | CI [+7.5%, +10.0%] |
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| cJSON HTTP service — p50 latency under replay | +6.2% | CI [+5.8%, +7.2%] |
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| comrak (Rust) — mimalloc (class 2) | +4.6% | CI [+3.3%, +5.8%], [human-ruled](results/rulings/phase0-comrak-002.md) |
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## Layout
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```
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crates/ Trust layer — agent has NO write access (SPEC §10)
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bench-runner/ Interleaved A/B, bootstrap CIs, A/A calibration, service mode
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diff-test/ Equivalence gates, corpus hash-pinning, per-target spec
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ledger/ Append-only SQLite attempt ledger (mutation-refusing triggers)
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report/ ROI: speedup CI → cores → dollars, methodology inline
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verdict/ The pipeline in one command: gates → bench → ledger row
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harnessd/ The one door the agent talks through (7 JSON ops)
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agent/ Untrusted proposer (Claude Agent SDK, Python)
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playbook/ Optimization classes 1–7, tried strictly cheapest-first
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config/ accept.toml (thresholds), pricing.toml (ROI inputs)
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targets/ Vendored OSS targets — the only agent-writable path
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corpora/ Hash-pinned golden-replay inputs (read-only to agent)
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results/ Calibration evidence, case studies, generated ROI reports
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docs/ The mdBook site (deployed to GitHub Pages)
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```
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## Quick start
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```sh
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just build / test / lint # trust-layer workspace
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just aa # A/A self-test — must yield a null verdict
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just gates <target> # corpus pin + upstream tests + golden replay
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# (fuzz needs a baseline — it runs in `just verdict`)
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just verdict <t> <bin> ... # gates + fuzz + sanitizers + bench vs pristine baseline
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just report <run-id> # ROI report from a ledger row
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just isolation-check # 19 OS-boundary checks (both modes)
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```
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The pipeline is **Linux/POSIX-only** at runtime (Unix sockets, `setsid`,
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sh-based gates). Windows builds the workspace and runs the portable unit
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tests, but cannot run the pipeline.
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Full command reference and reproduction steps:
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[Reproduce it yourself](https://bdbrown4.github.io/peltier.io/reproduce.html).
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## Use it on your own code
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The trust layer is not specific to these targets — it will judge any two shell
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commands. `.claude/skills/peltier/` packages it as a Claude Code skill:
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```sh
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# from any repo, with a peltier checkout reachable
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export PELTIER_HOME=/path/to/peltier.io
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mkdir -p .claude/skills
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cp -r /path/to/peltier.io/.claude/skills/peltier .claude/skills/
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```
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Then ask Claude to verify a speedup. The skill enforces the order that makes a
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performance claim mean something: **equivalence before timing** (a faster
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program that computes something different is a bug, not an optimization) →
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**A/A calibration** (a host that "finds" a speedup between a binary and itself
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cannot measure yours) → **interleaved A/B with a bootstrap CI** → a verdict
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decided by the CI *lower bound*, never the median.
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It drives the real `bench-runner` binary and **refuses rather than degrade**:
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on an unsupported host, or with no trust layer reachable, it stops and says so
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instead of falling back to a hand-rolled timing loop. A second copy of the
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statistics is a second thing that can lie.
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## How it stays honest
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- The agent speaks to the trust layer through **seven read-only-plus-one-
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write JSON operations**; it has no shell, cannot write outside a target
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workspace, and cannot touch the ledger or thresholds.
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- The **baseline is rebuilt from a pristine checkout** every session — a
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patch never becomes its own comparison.
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- The **ledger is append-only** (SQLite triggers refuse UPDATE/DELETE);
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accepted rows are written only by the `verdict` binary after the gates.
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- The agent process runs under **OS-level isolation** (read-only mount
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namespace or an unprivileged uid) — the boundary is filesystem
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permissions, not a prompt.
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See [the case studies](https://bdbrown4.github.io/peltier.io/case-studies/overview.html)
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— especially [the caught false-accept](https://bdbrown4.github.io/peltier.io/case-studies/comrak-false-accept.html),
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where the pipeline over-accepted a leaking patch and the audit overturned
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it before it shipped.
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## License
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GPL-3.0-or-later — see [LICENSE](LICENSE).
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