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name, description, metadata
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| feedback-completion-is-a-tripwire | The feeling of "done" — especially after fluent output — is the cue to verify the tail (census/gate/scan-check), not the signal to ship. The last 10% is where trust is earned or faked and is invisible from inside the first 90%. |
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Completion is a tripwire, not a finish line. The feeling of "done" — especially right after fluent output — is the cue to verify the tail (census / gate / scan-check), not the signal to ship. The last 10% of a task, where trust is earned or faked, does not show from inside the first 90%; and a fluent collaborator widens that gap rather than closing it.
Why: Cargill's Ninety-Ninety Rule (the last 10% of the code takes the other 90% of the time) is, for a verbatim-fidelity / trust substrate, a security property, not just a scheduling joke. A 90%-done graduation is worth less than zero — it looks finished while blank-page gibberish or a glued head silently poisons the one property (trustworthiness) the corpus exists for. This is distinct from the contamination problem (my bias toward shipping, ~/_Dev/CapableMind-AI/docs/thinking/David/methodology/contamination-problem.md): it is a claim about the structure of the work — the work is back-loaded, and the tail is unmappable from the head (2026-07-06: the checkpoint's "fix glue + occurrence index" was actually four problems; the census revealed it, not the plan). This is a retrievable handle on the contamination-problem + τὸ πρόσφορον threads in ~/CLAUDE.md, not a new rule — its value is that it is short enough to fire in the moment of temptation.
How to apply: When a task feels done, treat that as the trigger to run the last-10% verification, not the cue to declare it finished — census the scope you think remains (it is usually larger than the plan says), run the gate, verify a suspect region against the substrate. AND distinguish the last-10%-of-fidelity (pay it — it is the point) from the last-10%-of-gold-plating (τὸ πρόσφορον / "least that does the most" says stop) and from paying it by building a tool (that is how the tail becomes permanent bloat — the windowed-gate almost-built 2026-07-06). Kin to feedback-trust-prior-pass-frame (verify at the scope of the extension) and feedback-tool-review-after-each-use.