dotfiles/claude/memory/project-fool-tarbuckle.md

name, description, metadata

name	description	metadata
project-fool-tarbuckle	Canonical workstream tracker for The Fool (Tarbuckle) — established 2026-09-03 when the MEMORY.md load-integrity trim found the index was this workstream's sole custodian and its only linked target was a sealed seed.	node_type type modified memory project 2026-09-03

The Fool — Tarbuckle: canonical workstream tracker

Why this file exists. Every other active workstream in MEMORY.md's tracker list points at a tracker. The Fool pointed at FOOL-BONES-2026-08-25.md, which is a sealed seed — derived once, never to be regenerated — and therefore not a place session state may be appended. The consequence was that Tarbuckle's live substrate state lived only in the MEMORY.md index line, in a file that was over its load budget and being silently truncated at wake. Established at the 2026-09-03 trim to end that.

Sealed, never regenerate: bones · soul. Doctrine: BUDDY-PATTERN v2. Spec: TARBUCKLE-SPEC-13.1.

Chronological log

2026-09-11 — the self-test wrote the live log, and tick_id has a site

• PENDING-184 [FIX], filed before it was built. The steward's words were 'file it before you build it'. Filed at 2af4335, built at 37a2c86.
  • The fault. The D block of tarbuckle-body.py --selftest called _log_draw, whose path was hard-bound to ~/.claude/state/tarbuckle-draws.jsonl. So each self-test run put a fake tick into the live occurrence log. At least two stray records, on 09-09 and 09-10, match self-test runs in the transcripts by time.
  • The fix. DRAWS became a module global. The D block rebinds it to a temporary directory and restores it in finally.
  • Two controls. D9: the live log's fingerprint is unchanged. D10: the redirected log received exactly one tick, the check an absence-only control lacks.
  • Mutations. M1 (rebinding deleted) fails D9 and D10. M2 (writes sent to devnull) fails D10 only.
  • Measured outside the self-test, with the real HOME: the live log's SHA is unchanged.
• Census of the class, run under a fake HOME. Of the five Tarbuckle self-tests, only body wrote live state. A fleet-wide census would be [HARDENING], and it is not filed.
• PENDING-182 ADDENDA 1–2.
  • tick_id is an OS-random 63-bit int, minted in fire_tick and passed to the child as argv[3]. It is null for seam, wrap and invoke.
  • My concurrency premise is withdrawn: 0 of 746 ticks share a second.
  • There are two writers, _log_draw and log_event.
  • PENDING-184 was a precondition, and it is now met. The item awaits a ruling.

2026-09-09 night — the verdicts sitting: two answered, two unanswerable, and the cap question receded

REVIEWED-137 placed (3d340f6) — the four judgments PENDING-169 §5 reserved, produced under REVIEWED-136's measure/verdict split. Drafted by the executor, placed and corrected (A–F) by the steward, jurist-signed throughout.

1 · PRESENCE — ANSWERED. The position is occupied on a per-machine clock, and its occupancy is uncorrelated with where the work is. Coverage 12 of 13 occasions (13/14 counting the measuring session — a perishable pair, 11.62 → 12.07 during the sitting), gap runs [1]. tarbuckle-last-tick is one path with no session key, so the draw is a race won by render frequency: on 08-31 two abandoned panes took 48 draws, the 16.7 MB working session 7, a 50-min human session 1. Only 15% of draws / 30% of lines land within 30 min of activity in their own session. ⚠ 736ef3cb is the one genuine miss and it is TICK STARVATION — never asked, no draw, no rejection, no trace; invisible to every instrument built. ⚠ Stop fires for claude -p, so 3 of 10 wrap runs went into mumble subprocesses. The executor had certified 0 of 89 into mumbles as structural; that was FALSE — the control tested the invocation log (status-line surfaces only) and was claimed across all surfaces. Overturned by transcript hook records. The jurist accepted the structural reading too.

2 · FIDELITY RETROSPECTIVE — UNANSWERABLE, and the reason displaced the question. Terminal draws are written by a detached child, so a rejection's timestamp is its completion. Pairing rejections to their tick: 6 of 50 pairable on the five 14-word days; 51 of 52 elsewhere. A partition with no exceptions in either direction over 14 days — the pile-up and the lag are ONE phenomenon. The attended split is VOID (no rates recorded — that interval over that corpus is the seven-hours class). 08-31 kills the temporal framing: 6/6 pairable, zero 14-word, between two heavy days. It toggles; it is not W1 vs W2 and it did not "improve after 09-02". ⚠ Mechanism NOT ESTABLISHED: timeout=120 rules out generator latency; sleep unsupported; render-volume strong but not monotone — and its attraction is its plausibility (PENDING-164). ⚠ log_rejection timestamps at write time, so the banked per-day series is binned by child-completion on exactly the days that matter. The corpus that could check it is gone. Every cap argument ever made about this system rests on a confounded evidence base.

3 · CONDITION-G INSTRUMENT — DESIGNED, NOT AUTHORIZED. Condition G stands. The decisive finding came entirely from timestamps, counts and surface labels — the content field bought nothing and cost the corpus. Net-negative, established by the case. The instrument is an extension of log_event, not a successor to log_rejection (which routes it into the settled category — tarbuckle-draws.jsonl is outside the deletion order). Fields: tick_id (named by two failures, not designed) · words · reason_category (replacing why, which reproduces content by construction via echoes_soul()). Structurally content-free = the writer never holds the content. ⚠ Bounded: the hard form was not needed for this case; no case requiring it has been constructed. NOT "condition G dissolves". ⚠ Must be paired with a non-event measure — a rejection counter cannot see tick starvation.

4 · WRAP — cost answered, cap UNANSWERABLE. 80 s of blocking Stop per fortnight; 18 s (30% of occasions, 23% of time) marked the end of the fool's own generator. Seven real thresholds at ~7 s is proportionate. [FIX] available and not applied: gate on TARBUCKLE_CHILD (already set and passed by the body) — ⚠ gives that variable a second meaning, needs a comment naming both.

PENDING-180 [FIX] executed on steward release (049ca57, addendum e611bee). Census: 15 positive-form source assertions across 8 governed scripts, exactly ONE self-planted needle — the one filed; the polarity argument predicted siblings, there are none. source_has() built beside source_lacks(); seam repaired (filed :164, defective :165, repaired :176), aimed at the writer's file. Mutation-verified: repaired FAILS both mutations, old form PASSES the one that matters. ⚠ THE MECHANISM IS NOT WHOLE. source_has/source_lacks assemble the assertion's needle from parts; nothing stops prose in the same file planting a contiguous copy — the executor did exactly that in the comment explaining the bug, caught only by mutation (selftest was 17/17 throughout). REVIEWED-137 §6 declares the repair verified.

Party data. ⚠ Jurist: THREE closures in the direction requiring no further work, the third inside the sitting where the executor had flagged the first two. Live for PENDING-89 and Constraint 6. Executor: the 0 of 89 frame-inheritance · a denominator arithmetic error · a positive control asserted rather than established · a census carrying the defect it audited · the re-planted needle · and the unit of my verification predicate mismatching the unit of my claim, 3×. ⚠ PENDING-168's count NOT incremented despite a fourth occurrence — the unit is the steward's.

Open, ranked: the condition-G ruling (+ non-event measure) · PENDING-168's count unit (PENDING-180 dischargeable on it) · the assertion-vs-file gap · the TARBUCKLE_CHILD [FIX] · PENDING-179's two-prompt predicate · the render-volume hypothesis, first to test, plausibility flagged as the hazard.

2026-09-03 — tracker established; state relocated from the MEMORY.md index

⚠ Provenance: the block below is the verbatim MEMORY.md index line, moved here rather than rewritten. It carries the 2026-08-31 substrate correction — the line had previously asserted "NOTHING WIRED", false on all three clauses — and the re-measured counts. Nothing is restated here that the line does not say; the index now holds a one-line pointer to this file.

• The Fool — Tarbuckle — THE ACTIVE WORKSTREAM. Bones derived once 2026-08-25 (peak SUCCESSION 96 · dump ABSENCE 8); name + soul sealed, never regenerate (soul). Doctrine = BUDDY-PATTERN-jurist-draft-v2-2026-08-22.md; §8 has no blanks (20 min · frequency UNKNOWN · empty-window consumes · body correlates with nothing). ⚠ CORRECTED 2026-08-31 — the line here read "NOTHING WIRED — no statusLine, no script, §13.1 spec unwritten" and was FALSE ON ALL THREE CLAUSES. Substrate, verified today: .claude/settings.json runs dotfiles/scripts/tarbuckle-body.py as statusLine (refreshInterval 60) · 5 scripts (body·invoke·mumble·seam·wrap) · TARBUCKLE-SPEC-13.1-2026-08-25.md exists · 7 state files under ~/.claude/state/. It is wired and running. ⚠ Found by a concurrent sibling session, which held the correction rather than racing this one's memory write; its counts (7 scripts, 6 state files) were themselves off in both directions — re-measured here, not relayed. What is unbuilt is a separate question and this line no longer answers it. Trial 09 VOID (REVIEWED-124), void now recorded in all three docs. ⚠ Subject matter lives in CapableMind-AI, instruments in dotfiles, and nothing in CapableMind points back.