Drew's endgame deliverable is a workflow system another person can run solo on any
target, any compiler. We had three docs recording BFM's history (accelerators,
decision-log, automation-runbook) and none stating the SYSTEM. This is that document,
written to one rule: if it would still be true for a different console and a different
compiler, it belongs here.
Contents: the byte gate as the only arbiter and the oracle ladder around it (each
oracle must state its own blind spots); lanes and why the clock-limited one is never
stopped to ship a change; the CARD as fuel rather than a ticket, including the lever
lesson (a label a worker cannot look up is a dead end — 108 transcripts searched for a
word our knowledge base did not contain); draw-time refusal and the four measured
instances of the dominant defect class; free work before paid work; giving an excluded
population its own lane instead of an exclusion; model routing and per-lane budgets;
the flywheel with the one-wave lag and the inert-rider law (1 in 3 credited levers is
byte-inert, measured twice); the economics as measured; what transfers vs what does
not (the knowledge base is per-compiler, the machine that builds it is universal); and
a bootstrapping order for a new project.
Numbers are stated with their denominators so a new project calibrates rather than
copies.
bash parses a while...done body in full before executing, so a lane-ARG change needs
a fresh shell; a python bounce re-runs the old command line (measured P31 S59: an
18-minute-old edit was invisible to the bounced process). Includes the three-way
table of what takes effect when — code / args / wave-draw defaults.
R42: gate_main reverted 61 byte-proven overlay banks it could not distinguish from its own
substitution (sweep_parallel gates commit=False by design). Fixed by committing overlay banks
before the main batch, chunking main at 8 to bound bisect cost, and replacing every blind
'git checkout -- src/ config/' with commit-or-refuse in ox_campaign and idiom_serial.
R43: sweep_parallel had an explicit branch admitting main, which cannot be gated incrementally
— wave ab banked 0/105 main cards while its non-main cards banked 94/115 (82%), and the wave
read as a drafting failure. sweep_parallel now refuses main and names gate_main.py.
Also: validate_targets now prefers the card's own addr field (named symbols like SYS_OBJ_F00
were MALFORMED and discarded whole 220-card waves); ox_campaign deals model lanes by
smallest-ratio scheduling (a 73-card wave had put 73 shards on ox and 0 on deepseek);
docs/accelerators.md gains the four vacuous-check defects.
- BANKED: 11 functions at 400-952 ins from the cascade (func_8017D898 952, func_8017CE58 733,
func_801902EC 673, func_8018C2D8 673, func_8018A8D4, func_8017C6F4, func_800CBB38,
func_800CF3A4, +3). check-all 213/213 from a clean tree. 6 near = jr/switch (§53 separate
banking step), 1 failed. The cascade agents wrote 6 new cookbook sections incl. §158.
⚠️ tools-health UNVERIFIED at commit (stale cookbook index fixed, confirming re-run
interrupted) — run it first next session. check-all is the byte oracle and it is green.
- WASTE PREVENTION (Drew: "prevent this from ever happening again, however you need to"):
* tools/validate_targets.py (NEW) — names 5 defect classes (NO-ASM / MID-BODY /
OUT-OF-RANGE / ALREADY-DONE / NO-BOUNDARY), exits non-zero.
* WIRED INTO wave_snapshot so it fails closed — every wave passes through there for its .s
files, so no path from target list to spawned agents bypasses validation. Negative-control:
a 3-target bad list is refused with the exact mid-body offset (+72 bytes of 100).
* The cascade `done()` predicate now short-circuits on SKIPPED as well as MATCH. It tested
only MATCH, so a non-existent target fell Sonnet -> Opus -> Fable and three agents each
proved the same phantom absent: ~29 invalid targets x 3 tiers = 87 of 119 agents, ~9.7M
tokens. A tier that cannot act must END the pipeline, not escalate emptiness.
* docs/accelerators.md A9, including that wave_snapshot's own R32 assertion REFUSED that list
(24 of 57 found) and was routed around — the one instrument warning that was right and ignored.
- B RE-SCOPED (S46-10) and deliberately NOT done: the extend blocker is INTRA-HEADER, not
target-side. engine_core.h declares memcpy FOUR incompatible ways across its DEFINE_ macros;
two in one TU collide. NOT a safe cleanup — the in-tree note at ov_MAIN_012.c:14333 records
that `extern memcpy` disables gcc's builtin and turns an inlined block-move into a CALL, so the
declaration CHANGES CODEGEN. Probe one macro in one binary and byte-gate before any sweep.
- C (dedup_extend over the 129) stays blocked on B. Full context for both in the checkpoint.
Drew: "make it more multi-threaded... I still see my cpu idle for far too long."
Measured, fixed, and regression-tested against the S46-3 bank as a KNOWN ANSWER.
- THE MEASUREMENT: 31s saturated (33 makes/48 cc1/load 27) then ~25s with ONE build alive
while 31 cores idled, repeating. Causes: ex.map starts in list order so the giants land
last, and apply/restore is single-threaded.
- gate_all -> gate_failures: return EVERY failure the sweep already computed (~138 rounds -> 1).
- Longest-first gate scheduling; results re-sorted into `changed` order so the verdict stays
bit-identical to the serial loop's.
- PER-OVERLAY INDEPENDENT SEARCH, IN PROCESSES. My first cut used threads and the box refuted
it: 0-4 builds alive at load 3, because the work is regex over 15k-line files and 138
"parallel" searches all queued on the GIL. Same logic in a ProcessPoolExecutor: 14-29 builds,
load 34.75, search phase ~100s. Safe because the shared header is written ONCE by the parent
and each overlay owns its own .c files + build/<bin>/. Seeded with one in-process search
first — a pool submitted at once gives every worker an empty suspect list and makes all 138
pay a full bisection. place_in_overlay extracted to module level so the worker and the
in-process apply cannot drift (R33); compiles_standalone's fixed t.c is per-call now.
- THE REGRESSION (the point, not the stopwatch): revert src/+config to pre-bank, re-run the
identical command -> 29 functions (same), 141 overlays byte-identical, 682s vs ~1440s, and
285 exclusions vs ~350 => +62 MORE member instances (249,161). The old prefix-based
necessity probe was OVER-EXCLUDING (charging 4 fns to 9 overlays that did not all need
them); the per-overlay shrink minimises per overlay. The faster path is also more correct —
a timing comparison would never have shown it. R22 213/213 + tools-health green.
- STILL SERIAL, now the actual wall-clock (neither is a build): ~3min setup before the first
gate (registered_addrs() yaml-parsing a 1949-group/249k-instance registry + 213 sig loads)
and ~2.5min of sequential reconcile_caller_extern after the search.
- Captured as defaults: docs/accelerators.md A8 + memory fleet-tool-parallelism-defaults.
cookbook index regenerated (my §155c append left it stale — the gate caught it, exit 1).
The S45p9 blocker is closed, and the recovery loop that kept it from finishing is rewritten.
- BANKED: dedup_propagate --auto-from ov_SC02_037 --recover -> 29 functions propagated,
141 overlays byte-identical, dedup 1920 -> 1949 groups, member instances 246,284 ->
249,099 (+2,815). make clean && extract-all && check-all -> 213 passed / 0 failed (R22).
- WHY IT FINISHED THIS TIME: gate_all -> gate_failures returns EVERY failure from the sweep
that already computed them, and the recovery loop resolves them all per round. Converged in
3 rounds; the old one-overlay-per-sweep design needed ~138. That reframes the S45 run — it
was not nearly done when it died, it had barely started.
- Batching did NOT cost capability: per-overlay necessity probes excluded four of the nine
culprits from only the 9 overlays that needed it (not all 138), and ov_SC07_006 was
RECOVERED by the Part-B caller-extern reconcile instead of excluded.
- Plan phase parallelised: 5 min -> 26 s, plan + skip classification byte-identical. Its
compiles_standalone temp file is per-call now — the fixed `t.c` was the same fake-isolation
class as match_one's shared --work dir (P28 T5), latent until something ran it in parallel.
- docs/accelerators.md (NEW, Drew 2026-08-07): the reusable-workflow ledger — what we learned
late that a future decomp should know on day one, each entry with when we found it, when it
WAS findable, what it cost, and the honest prerequisite where one exists.
Drew T