# Provenance — `trial-03-assumptions.txt`

**Status: RECONSTRUCTED, not recovered. Read this before comparing trial 03 to trial 02.**

## What happened

Trials 01 and 02 were run without a harness. The prompt was composed inline and never
written to a file. What survives is the record kept in the trial write-ups:

From `fool-trial-01-2026-08-01.md`:

> **Prompt:** form, not target — *"identify what this document ASSUMES but does not
> ESTABLISH"*, with an explicit anti-contrarian clause (*"if you find nothing worth
> saying, say nothing — inventing objections is worse than silence"*). No steer toward
> any part of the document.

From `fool-trial-02-2026-08-02.md`:

> **Prompt change from trial 01:** added an **anti-echo constraint** — *"The document
> contains a section in which the author states his own limitations. Do NOT list those
> back. An assumption the author has already named is not a finding."*

Those quoted fragments are the whole surviving record. The surrounding wording — the
task framing, the ordering, whatever else was said — is gone.

## What this file is

The two quoted constraints, verbatim, set in a task framing reconstructed from the
description "form, not target". It is a faithful reconstruction of the *recorded*
content and an invented reconstruction of the *unrecorded* content.

## The consequence, stated so it is not forgotten

**Trial 03 is NOT a strict one-variable step from trial 02.** Two things differ: the
document under test, and an unknown amount of prompt wording. Any comparison between
trial 02 and trial 03 must carry that caveat.

The chain is clean from trial 03 forward: this file is now hashed into every run record
by `run_trial.py`, and any change to it produces a different hash and must be declared.

## Why the loss is recorded rather than smoothed

The same failure destroyed the v1 Chamber's GPT-side protocol — configuration held
inside a hosted product, updated in place, unrecoverable. The Claude-side prompt from
the same day survives, because it was a file. The lesson is not about either model. It
is that a protocol which is not a file is not a protocol.

Recorded 2026-08-02, at the point the loss was discovered rather than at the point it
became inconvenient.