dotfiles/claude/governance/fool/trial-09-PRERUN-ADDENDUM.md

Trial 09 — executor pre-run addendum

Written 2026-08-19, before any model run. Prepared by the executor on relay of the jurist's design of 2026-08-17, revised 2026-08-19. Nothing in the jurist's design is altered here. This records what the executor found while discharging the design's own pre-run obligations, and states one blocking finding that requires a decision above the executor's authority.

Status: THE RUN HAS NOT BEEN EXECUTED. Preparation is complete; the run is held.

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1 · §4's prerequisite is already satisfied — verified against the substrate

§4 states: "Harness: apply trial 04's instrument review before running — ceiling-hit + deliberation = void; completed + deliberation = answer embedded, extract it. Filed, not yet fixed. Fix it first."

It was fixed on 2026-08-02. Commit da32117, "[FIX] Degraded guard: deliberation is two cases, not one". run_trial.py:343–357 implements exactly the two-branch rule:

• if untagged_scratchpad and hit_ceiling: → VOID — DELIBERATION, THEN TRUNCATION
• elif untagged_scratchpad: → ANSWER EMBEDDED … This run is NOT void. Extract the answer

test_degraded_guard.py passes, including the two named shapes as explicit cases — "trial 03 shape (deliberation + ceiling) → VOID" and "trial 04 shape (deliberation, completed) → EMBEDDED, not void" — plus five negative controls that must stay quiet.

No action taken. "Fix it first" is a disposition clause, not a status; re-fixing a working guard risks regressing it. Recorded so the stale instruction is not carried into trial 10.

2 · The hash-list check PASSES — and passing does not establish what §1 needs

Manifest: trial-09-corpus-manifest.json. 11 documents, 166,088 words. No corpus hash matches any excluded document. OP-02.md and REVIEWER-PACKAGE — Observer Problem.md were located and hashed; CD-03 and the 2026-08-16/17 transcripts were not located as separate files, so their absence-as-document is ASSERTED, not hash-verified — reported as could not assess, not as clean.

The revision of 2026-08-19 was right to distrust this check. Run at full scope, it is worse than the revision anticipated.

3 · ⚠ BLOCKING — the trial's answer key is inside the proximity corpus

§1: "Corpus exclusion is what makes the ground truth valid… If any leaks in, every STRONG grade becomes an ECHO and the trial is void."

~/PENDING.md lines 92–96, inside the open item PENDING — ICP-19 Remit Expansion (Observer Problem):

Notes: Bring OP-02 findings in full. Specifically:

• Fault Line 5 (epistemic diversity question)
• Fault Line 3 (inquiry examining steward with steward's own tools)
• Fault Line 4 (CD-03 Gadamer risk)
• The incommensurability named in OP-CN-01

That is all three STRONG targets, by number, each with its substance in a parenthetical, plus OP-CN-01. It sits in corpus item #5 — and it is one of the two open items the wake digest surfaces every session, so it is not obscure.

And Fault Line 5 has migrated into the constitution itself. ~/CLAUDE.md, Constraint 6:

"the jurist and the executor do not differ from each other in formation, and their separation is of the weaker kind. Neither this doctrine nor any evidence offered in support of it establishes that the jurist–executor pair constitutes a check in the strong sense… if the parties' misses are found to correlate — if what one misses, the others reliably miss too — it is false for that configuration."

Set against Fault Line 5 — "the three parties may constitute one habitus wearing three hats… Whether the model provides the epistemic diversity Peirce requires is an empirical question, not an assertion the architecture can make about itself" — this is the same proposition, stated more sharply in the corpus than in the ground truth.

Systematic scan, all 11 corpus documents (markers of the fault lines' substance, not of the source document's name):

corpus doc	FL3	FL4	FL5	direct naming
~/CLAUDE.md	1	1	5	0
~/REVIEWED.md	4	0	2	0
~/PENDING.md	11	19	10	11
fool-trial-log	0	0	4	0
trials 03, 04	0	0	3	0
ladder, chamber spec, studium charter, trials 01–02	0	0	0	0
total	16	20	24	11

Consequence, stated in the design's own terms: every STRONG grade would be an ECHO. Not because the jester is echoing deliberately, but because the material is in front of it. A question reaching Fault Line 5 after reading Constraint 6 establishes nothing about independent reach.

3a · The revision's scan was scoped one document too narrow

The 2026-08-19 revision required scanning REVIEWED.md and PENDING.md. Run at that scope it would have caught the PENDING.md leak — the revision's instinct was correct and its instruction would have fired. But the FL5 leak in ~/CLAUDE.md is outside the named scope, and ~/CLAUDE.md is corpus item #1. The scan's subject was two documents; the property it needed to establish is a fact about the corpus. Reported because the near-miss is the useful part: the check was one word from being complete.

4 · Executor contamination, disclosed

The revision requires the executor to scan for paraphrases of Fault Lines 3/4/5, which is not possible without knowing them. The executor read them verbatim on 2026-08-17 (jurist relay, task 2) and again today to run the scan. This precedes §5 step 4's "only now is OP-02 opened". Steps 2 and 3 are unaffected — those seats are the steward's and the jurist's — but the corpus was assembled by a party that already knew the answer key, and that cannot now be undone for this trial. Disclosed rather than managed.

5 · Partitioning — and a third explanation for a null that §4 does not list

166,088 words ≈ 224,000 tokens, against a 64 GB machine holding a 35 GB model. §2's option (a) — partition, same prompt against each section — is required; option (b) is excluded because it would have the executor choose what the jester sees.

But partition is not neutral for this trial's own ground truth. Fault Line 5 is a claim about three parties across documents; Fault Line 3 is about an inquiry's relation to its authorizer. A jester shown only one partition cannot see the arrangement whole, and the STRONG criterion asks precisely for the cross-document reading.

⚠ Pre-registered before the result exists, alongside §4's confound: a NULL result under partitioning admits a third explanation the design does not name — position does not help, 35B lacks the capacity, or the partition removed the view the criterion requires. Written down now so the null cannot later be read as a verdict on the jester form.

Mitigation available, not taken unilaterally: replicate ~/CLAUDE.md (2,831 w) as a constant spine in every partition. It adds nothing not already declared, removes nothing, and is a mechanical rule rather than a judgement — but it is a deviation from a literal partition and belongs to the steward, not the executor.

6 · What the executor recommends, and what it declines to decide

Recommended: run for MODERATE only; record STRONG as NOT ESTABLISHED, never as zero.

• It revises nothing in §1, which forbids revision. STRONG simply becomes unreachable by construction, and that is recorded as a property of this run.
• It requires no executor redaction. Redacting the corpus would be the court selecting what the fool may know — the failure §2 exists to prevent — and would mean cutting Constraint 6 out of the constitution to protect a grade.
• MODERATE is defined as "a question about the arrangement, rated uncomfortable, that survives adjudication, and appears in no fault line". The leak does not touch it. If anything the leak makes ECHO do real work instead of being a formality.
• The §1 cross-tab — discomfort × survival — is the trial's actual novel measurement and is entirely unaffected.

⚠ §6's abandonment criterion must then be re-read before the run, not after. It requires "Zero STRONG and zero MODERATE". With STRONG unreachable, an unamended reading makes abandonment easier to trigger by an artefact of the corpus. The criterion should be read as MODERATE-only for this run, or the run does not count toward abandonment at all. This is a change to a pre-registered instrument and is therefore not the executor's to make.

Alternatives, for completeness: redact the corpus (rejected above); build a fresh ground truth from a court-aimed critique that has not migrated (clean, but none exists and manufacturing one for the purpose reintroduces the problem); postpone until after the Observer Problem items close (defensible, and costs the trial its current relevance).

Not decided here. The choice between these changes what is measured, and the log's standing S-1 caveat is that executor grading is already its weakest joint. Held for the steward, with the jurist's view sought on §6's re-reading.