Correcting my own guidance from earlier today. §378 gave the self-caller chain;
three more variants appeared within hours and two of them BREAK the chain.
Variant 3 (NEW, byte-proven ov_SC04_018/func_8017F35C, banked): conflicting
RETURN type on a decl that is ALREADY no-proto, where the symbol is
ADDRESS-TAKEN rather than called. --any-proto has nothing to relax and
cast_self_callers has no call site to cast; --sync-decls ALONE fixes it, and is
safe precisely because an address-taken site has no arguments to convert.
Variant 4 (REFUTATION of what I wrote in the playbook this morning): "run the
same chain on the callee the diagnostic names" is wrong at scale. Applied to
func_8012AD44 in ov_SC07_000 it no-protoed 60 caller decls and the binary went
RED (265b24bb vs 9dbe4241); reverted via journal. The self case is safe because
step 2 casts the call sites so the decl change cannot alter argument conversion;
for a callee, cast_self_callers correctly refuses and the decl change runs
unprotected. It banked main/func_80021D38 only because that callee had ONE decl,
not sixty.
Rule added: never --any-proto a symbol whose call sites you are not also casting;
count the sites first. The chain is a DECISION TABLE, not a sequence to run
blindly.
tools/seed_ref.py gains --contained/--contained-control: an open stub that is a
banked body plus or minus WHOLE BLOCKS — the class edit distance ranks badly.
Branch-offset masking was required (unmasked offsets veto exactly the target
pairs) and a min-side-25 floor (89% of raw hits were prologue/epilogue vacuity).
Ranks by (substitutions+regions, cover), not by d. Controls: planted-deletion
positive 60/60, random-pair base rate 0/397, R32 population 346/346, and a
post-refactor --near regression reproducing the stored slice exactly.
Banked on first use: ov_SC01_077/func_80184D50 = banked ov_SC03_007/func_8018283C
minus its trailing `&= 0x7FFFFFFF;` — MATCH, closeness 0, 98/98.
* cookbook §390: minimum distance is not minimum work (rank by effort; a deletion
is free, a substitution is thought), the lookalike filter r = d/min(nins) ~ 0.3
(17 of 30 "cousins" were boilerplate coincidence), and the three fleet-wide
nulls that close the scanner question — 0 new / 9 / 2. Spend integration
effort, not scanner effort.
* cookbook §391: a byte-aligned struct copies in FOUR instructions (lwl/lwr/swl/
swr), a word-aligned one in TWO. Never invent an aggregate type to make a draft
compile — an invented word-aligned Blk8 lost exactly 8 ins across two copies and
read as a believable "near, closeness 70" codegen residual.
* accelerators #18: a claim derived from BYTES is not a claim verified by a
COMPILER. Every similarity/correctness claim must name the tier it reached
(stream containment / compiled standalone / whole-binary gate / clean fleet);
a report that says "verified" without one invites the strongest reading.
Non-reproduction is a finding — say so rather than assuming your own setup.
* playbook §2a-2: the twin ladder (exact -> RELOC-ONLY -> CONTAINED -> cousin ->
cold), take the cheapest tier available, widen only when the tier above is empty.
* SETUP inventory row; generic-decomp-package: rank by work, and stop building
scanners once the well is dry.
The exact-hash twin tier found 22 of 352 reachable open stubs (6%). The
edit-distance band added by `seed_ref --near` finds 75 of 352 (21%) — 3.4x — on a
corpus we believed fully mined. 31 of the new rows were PURE reloc-only twins of
already-banked bodies; 8 banked the same day at ~0 agent tokens, one 94-ins
exemplar serving five open copies.
* cookbook §389: the h_norm hole (norm_stream drops its pending lui-hi on an
intervening R-type, so indexed-global reloc twins hash differently and vanish
from seed_ref/twin_sweep/dedup/family-maps at once). Do NOT fix h_norm — every
stored calibration keys on it; the near tier reads through it.
* accelerators #17: the generalisable law. A similarity hash built for DEDUP
under-matches by design, which is correct for dedup and silently lossy as a
FRONTIER join — the two questions want opposite error directions, and the
frontier failure looks exactly like "this function is unique".
* generic-decomp-package §2b: build the near band at the same time as the exact
tier, with the three verifications. It pays from the first bank for a new
project, where we paid a session to recover the debt.
* SETUP inventory row + playbook §2a (run it before believing any "no twin"
verdict; never send a RELOC-ONLY row to a drafting agent).
The lever existed but nothing downstream applied it. Proof it mattered: a wave
agent this session diagnosed its own blocker as "§378 THE SELF-CALLER CAST, a
TU-level fix (cast_self_callers.py) that requires editing src/, which I'm not
permitted to touch" — the knowledge propagated, the automation did not.
* recover_integration.py: NEW "self-cast" stage (tier=binary), so the driver can
run the whole chain as --stages arity,self-cast. The docstring states WHY the
order is not arbitrary: self-cast answers the error that "arity" CREATES.
* residual_rules_b.py: both decl-conflict tiers now prescribe the full chain
instead of "route to integration / budget for banking", and
NOCOMPILE-UNDECLARED-FIXED now says outright NOT to gate the autodecl arm (it
is a second conflicting declaration in the real TU).
* wave-playbook §4b: replaced the stale two-step recipe with the three-step
chain, the one-driver form, the callee variant, and the MANDATORY
--undo-journal.
* SETUP.md: full inventory row (R21) — it had zero mentions.
Not wired, deliberately: gate_stage's ladder rewrites DRAFTS via _xform, while
this edits the TU; a src-side edit inside the automatic gate needs
revert-on-failure, which recover_integration already owns.
Still open: a draft_prechecks rule to catch the self-decl conflict statically,
before a build is spent. The new stage's plumbing is verified (CLI + candidate
selection); its functional end-to-end run is NOT — gate12 held the tree.
tools/triage_ladder.py — the zero-token pre-agent pass, split PRE (target-side:
BANKED/WALL-332/PARKED, no build) from POST (residual_rules_b, needs a draft).
--escalate refuses a walled or banked target; --acceptance is the R39/R32 harness.
Refuses on a non-quiescent tree: a merging gate makes the stub oracle wrong in
both directions (measured, ov_SC01_004:func_8017EB30).
Acceptance, on the whole corpus: false-skip 0/1367 open stubs, recall 426/426
matched, wall tier fires on exactly the 10 enumerated walls (0 extra, 0 missing).
The first wall control asked for evidence that CANNOT exist — it scanned banked
functions' .s, which splat never writes — and printed '0 scanned / 0 tripped',
indistinguishable from a pass. The R32 empty-denominator assertion caught it on
its first run; replaced with a two-sided sweep over all open stubs.
tools/cast_self_callers.py — the §378 lever + --sync-decls for the narrow-param
case C89 forbids no-proto from reaching (§378a).
Wiring: wave_args drops walled/parked targets at draw time via pre_classify (one
implementation, R33); escalate_fable.js refuses any target without triage:'DRAFT'.
Tool fixes found by measurement:
* fix_arity_callers was blind to main entirely (globbed src/main/main*.c; main is
src/*.c) — reported success over an empty file set through three gates. Now
refuses when --binary selects no files.
* parallel_gate records each worker's 'failed by class' line (was truncated out of
the 200-char tail); gater_lane retries in-tree ONLY on the diagnostic-free
blind-worktree signature — S69 ran 22 serial retries against real cc1 errors.
docs: cookbook §376/§377/§378 (index 1033), SETUP.md, wave-playbook §4b.
A tool nobody knows about is invisible work. Audit found neighbor_ref (built an
hour ago), residual_rules, lane_inflight and r22_verify in NEITHER doc, and
wall_sweep in the playbook but not the inventory.
SETUP.md gains a tooling-inventory row for all five with what each is FOR.
wave-playbook gains §2b: run neighbor_ref for EVERY card, placed right after the
seed_ref step because it answers the weaker and far more common question ('which
matched function should this agent READ?') that seed_ref structurally cannot. It
carries the measurement that justifies it -- a ~20x token swing on that single
variable -- and the failure it prevents: func_8017BEBC's card said 'no banked twin'
while a matched 755-instruction near-twin sat 3,700 lines up IN ITS OWN FILE.
Also states the two honest limits: an opt-level mismatch is PENALISED not merely
ranked low (§116 -- an -O2 example misleads an -O0 target), and a neighbour is a
worked example to READ, never a body to copy (§168 law 1, cousin-remap 0/26).
tools/wall_sweep.py --emit-exclude feeds draw_waves --exclude directly. 10
functions / 1,027 instructions over 1,378 open-stub .s files, against §332's
'6 fleet-wide' with two named.
Recorded what it caught immediately: main/func_8005D734 was already escalated to
Fable at closeness 8 when the sweep listed it, and its site is exactly the residual
that agent described -- stopped. Filtering the live queue dropped two more before
they were drafted (func_8005D9C4 133 ins, func_8005F450 159 ins).
The §188 epilogue half is still NOT built and is now named as such rather than left
implied: its detector exists inside oracle_reorder.py and has never been run as a
sweep.
A wall nobody has met yet is invisible to the draw filter, so new ones are found by
PAYING an agent to hit one. Twice in S68 on main: func_8005E228 (a full run, then
banked the §265 verbatim-asm way) and func_8005F0C8 (289k tokens to reach closeness
36 with the residual confirmed as §188's epilogue by oracle_reorder.py).
Neither is a model failure. An agent handed a wall returns a NEAR with an
unexplainable tail, which looks exactly like a hard function -- and an escalation
cannot beat the toolchain, so escalating one is guaranteed waste.
The fix is named rather than left as folklore: run the §188 epilogue-shape detector
over every open stub AT DRAW TIME. It already exists inside oracle_reorder.py and
has never been run as a sweep. Until then, treat 'NEAR with an epilogue-shaped
tail' as a walls candidate and check it with the oracle BEFORE escalating.
Measured a SECOND time in S67, and the first fix was incomplete. A waiter using the bracketed
pattern still matched itself and spun 1h35m, because the same shell command had LAUNCHED the job —
so its own command line carried the unbracketed 'gate_stage.py --binary ov_SC07_007' from the nohup
half. The regex gate_[s]tage.py does not match the literal bracketed text, but it happily matches
the plain text sitting earlier on the same line.
Rule is now: launch and wait in SEPARATE shell invocations, or better, wait on a completion MARKER
the job writes to its own log rather than on process liveness.
THE DOC GAP, and it cost tokens this session. `docs/automation-runbook.md` was titled "the
autonomous campaign, as it actually runs" while documenting the RETIRED OpenRouter/ox-alpha system
whose lanes are all deliberately DEAD. The current Claude-wave pipeline existed only as two dense
tooling-inventory rows in SETUP.md — reference, not procedure. Three of this session's costliest
mistakes were procedural and a playbook prevents each:
* hand-typed a refill target -> invented func_80184F60 (2nd instruction of a matched function), 58k
* hand-rolled a serial gate loop when parallel_gate existed -> ~1h for what took 103s
* re-derived a function banked verbatim in ~20 overlays -> 102k
NEW docs/wave-playbook.md — start to finish, each guard paired with the MEASUREMENT that produced it
(that pairing is the part a generic decomp guide cannot have, and the seed of the future template).
automation-runbook.md retitled HISTORICAL with a pointer; SETUP.md §6.9 links the playbook.
NEW tools/seed_ref.py — the cross-TU banked twin, joined on corpus signature hashes (no atlas knn,
~2s fleet-wide), wired into t5_cards.py. FLEET: 87 open stubs have a banked twin; 41 of them sit in
twin_sweep's refusal ledger, invisible to BOTH tools at once. Documents twin_sweep's two holes:
load_sigs covers 141/213 binaries (main, resident, all md_MAIN_* absent), and one curated symbol
name silently disables an entire binary via a bare `except Exception: pass`.
Schema note: seed_ref's binary/fn are the EXEMPLAR's, because api_agent greps src/{binary} for {fn};
naming them after the target would send every agent grepping for itself — caught pre-ship.
HARVEST §333-§338 from the s67o2_1/pool_1 waves:
§333 frame size is set by DECLARED aggregates, not used ones — an unreferenced trailing local is a
dial (3 instances; one worth 30 of 32 residual rows)
§334 a reload spill slot rounds to BIGGEST_ALIGNMENT for align AND size: one 4-byte pseudo grew a
frame by 16 (82->53)
§335 `extern u16 A[]` at a variable subscript allocates ~8B/access of dead stack temps that inflate
the frame with ZERO extra instructions — invisible in a body diff (141->20)
§336 the §5a barrier goes at the BOTTOM of the twin; find_cross_jump walks BACKWARD
§337 the CC1-ONLY blocker class: blocker_probe's static oracle says "none" and cc1 still fails
§338 _sltiu_bounds misreads a non-switch sltiu as a bounds check, over-spanning the table
gate_wave.py now STREAMS both lanes (R55) — it captured output and printed at the end, leaving a
zero-byte log indistinguishable from a hang.
Drew T