The lock I added earlier today guards a real hazard (the driver mutates the shared tree and is not
parallel-safe), but I scoped it to the whole tool instead of the mutating path. --probe-only execs
blocker_probe, which compiles in its own scratch dir and touches nothing — excluding it buys no
safety and costs a free diagnostic.
Measured cost: a t7b drafting agent (func_801832E0) tried the probe TWICE, was refused both times by
a concurrent sweep holding the lock, and submitted with its blocker unconfirmed — exactly the $0
diagnostic the pack tells agents to run first.
Control: with the lock held, --probe-only now returns rc 0 and its verdict table; the mutating path
still returns rc 1 REFUSED.
The seam decays hard as it is worked out. Measured across four rounds today: 139/157 = 88.5%, then
178/234 = 76%, then 71/165 = 43%, then 1/95 = 1%. By the last round almost every candidate was one a
previous round had already tried and the gate had refused, so the sweep spent ~7 minutes of builds to
bank one function.
A refusal is deterministic for a given (target, EXEMPLAR) pair — the same exemplar remaps to the same
text — so the ledger keys on both and skips those by default. A NEW exemplar for the same target is a
different question and is retried automatically, which matters because the pool refills as banking
mints exemplars. --retry-refused overrides.
The ledger starts empty (today's rounds predate it) and populates from .run/pgate_results.json.
The distill prompt asserted 'the whole-binary byte-gate ACCEPTED the final draft, so the final body is
ground truth' for EVERY target. With --with-unbanked now feeding it drafts the gate REFUSED, that
sentence would have laundered an unproven body into a byte-proven cookbook entry (R14/G3). A target
with banked=False now gets an explicit PROVENANCE WARNING telling the distiller to extract the lever
anyway (cookbook 52: a model that FAILS still distils the idiom that cracks its siblings) but to mark
every claim UNPROVEN and never assert byte-equality; the verifier is told the same so its
entry_markdown carries the label. Exercised this session: the one surviving ADDENDUM came from an
unbanked draft and is filed UNPROVEN.
Also regenerates the scoreboard after the day's banks.
parallel_gate.py — the per-binary byte gate was serial BY HARNESS, not by nature. Each binary already
compiles into its own build/<bin>/, links its own .ld and checks its own SHA; what serialized it was
shared mutable state in the ONE checkout (the splice, assert_write_set's GLOBAL git status, and the
deliberately-broad `git add -u src/` that must stay broad). Measured: a 109-binary sweep ran ~1
min/binary on a 32-core box at load 1.4 (~4% utilisation), and an xargs -P 4 attempt over the shared
tree CORRUPTED it earlier today.
Fix is ISOLATION, not locking: one git worktree per worker (own index, own src/, own build/). Workers
gate and NEVER commit; the orchestrator adopts only drafts the gate ACCEPTED, and only where the main
tree still matches the pinned baseline (otherwise REFUSED, never clobbered), then ONE commit and ONE
R22 clean-fleet sweep verifies the merged whole.
Measured on 85 binaries / 234 candidates: 178 banked in 12m19s wall for 127m40s CPU = 10.4x
parallelism, ~7x end-to-end vs serial, 99 files merged, 0 refused, check-all 213/213.
Five things a fresh worktree does NOT have, each found by measurement and each first appearing as
"the draft failed": splat-generated include/*.inc, the EMPTY tools/maspsx submodule, gitignored
tools/bin (cc1) + tools/psyq, build/{<bin>,assets/<bin>} outputs, and extracted/retail. Dirs mixing
tracked and untracked content cannot be symlinked wholesale (ln -s nests INSIDE them) — hence
link_missing(). The negative control that catches all of it: an UNMODIFIED binary must build
BYTE-IDENTICAL in the worktree. Before that control, the first parallel run reported a clean,
plausible "0 banked across 4 binaries" that was pure environment artifact.
twin_sweep.py — enumerate every open stub that has an ALREADY-BANKED structural twin, remap it
mechanically, gate it. Yields measured today: h_exact 139/157 = 88.5%, h_norm 36/45 then 178/234
= 76-80%. h_seq stays refused (Phase-26) and is not used. THE POOL REFILLS: each bank becomes an
exemplar for its siblings — 165 fresh candidates existed immediately after banking 178. Run it
BEFORE drawing any wave; t5_cards does not build seed_ref, so cards assert "no banked twin" for
these and agents redraft answers we already hold (a t5u Opus slot ground ov_SC03_023:func_8017BEBC
to closeness 45 while ov_SC02_004 held a byte-identical banked copy).
Drew T