Every line is a symptom an agent HIT and had to re-derive from gcc internals because title-keyword
search structurally cannot surface it:
- SIZE-MISMATCH/short + frame-pointer prologue => the target is -O0, pass --o0 (the flag was
documented nowhere an agent would look; a 4th -O0 region also exists beyond the 3 known ones)
- rotated instruction window => sched1 order; brute-force all N! statement orders (24 runs, 2 min)
- if/else result in $v1 vs target's $v0, and load-hoisted-above-store => §76 variable reuse
(§76's title reads behemoth-only, so nobody finds it for a 48-ins function)
- ori 0xffd8 vs addiu -0x28 => negative const in an UNSIGNED narrow local; signed keeps the lhu
- LENGTH-DRIFT -1 as a missing jal-delay copy => narrow ANSI prototyped param (not just K&R §43)
- lwl/lwr+swl/swr is a delay-slot SPONGE (the inverse of the §5a fence case)
- a vanished param copy => cse.c make_regs_eqv live-range rule
- a ghidra_c seed may be a DIFFERENT function (overlays share VAs)
WAVE-2 MEASURED THE INDEX: 15/19 index hits and the bank rate went 57% (wave 1, no index) -> 79%
(wave 2, index-first) on the same gate. Agents also NAMED its gaps, which is the flywheel working.
Two real defects found and fixed:
1. COVERAGE. The parser required a '§' prefix, so 111 h2-h4 headers were invisible — including
'### T4 — Branch polarity', the fix match_one names by class (BRANCH-POLARITY) and which two
agents re-derived by hand, and the §1/§2 idiom-catalog entries (I1-I4, T1-T4).
2. THE ASSERTION ITSELF. My R32 check compared §-headers-parsed against §-header-CANDIDATES — a
tautology over a set I had already narrowed. R32 says the candidate set must OVER-approximate;
it now counts EVERY header and accounts for each as indexed-or-explicitly-skipped. The tool
written to stop silent skips had the silent-skip defect.
3. Keyword matching over titles cannot surface an idiom whose title omits the symptom, so the
index now opens with a hand-curated SYMPTOM -> section list, seeded from what agents actually
hit (branch polarity, (void)-canon conflicting types, asm-label alias, one-base-register reuse,
folded andi, slti/sltiu, sibling-first, delay-slot theft, void->s32).
Wave-1 measured the tax: three agents each reported a 'NEW idiom' that was ALREADY documented —
the asm-label alias (line ~2516, same 'address-of perturbs regalloc' mechanism) and the void->s32
non-neutrality (§41d, Phase 26; the agents cited the very entry §41d corrects). They consulted the
cookbook as instructed and could not FIND them. 716 KB / 226 sections with no index = a
discoverability failure, and every wave re-paying for prior waves' findings is the inverse of R16.
docs/cookbook-index.md maps SYMPTOM (what you see in the diff) -> sections, 14 buckets, a section
listed under every symptom it addresses. Derived by tools/cookbook_index.py (R33 — cannot drift),
--check wired into tools-health.
R32 on my own tool: the first regex required an em-dash separator and silently dropped 50 sections
— including §1 (idiom catalog), §2, §5a (cross-jump, cited by an agent today). An index missing its
most-cited entries turns 'I could not find it' into 'it is not there'. Now asserts extracted ==
candidate '§' headers and hard-exits on a gap.
Drew T