Measured over 129 drafting agents in one session, per MATCHED instruction (the
only cost that matters, since a failed agent is billed in full):
sonnet 105 agents, 57 MATCH 4,289 tok/matched-ins (flat ~47% above 30 ins)
opus 24 agents, 11 MATCH 2,083 (m1 191-347: 1,291, 67%)
opus at 347-670: 1/9 7,158 <- the cliff, 2.92M tokens for ONE bank
fable escalation: 3/4 closed at ~1/3 the cost of the attempt it rescued
Sonnet's per-agent price was never the cost that mattered; cost per BANK is, and
it lost on that by 2.1x. The m2 wave should have been fable from the start.
Escalating SOONER is the standing finding — higher models crack harder functions
in fewer tokens. Tested twice now (S68 A/B, S69 measurement); do not re-derive a
cheap-tier argument from per-agent price a third time.
draw_waves.py gains --only-main (the main lane draws main and nothing else; implies --main so the
LINKED refusal still applies). Progress/backlog regenerated: fleet 99.2% instruction-weighted,
98.1% distinct.
- match_one.py: a CPP/CC1/MASPSX/AS failure printed bare text and exited 1 even under --json, so
every programmatic caller got json.loads of a non-JSON line. claude_wave_packs swallowed 4 of 19
prior drafts as 'residual not measured: Expecting value' — the most actionable datum a pack can
carry (the draft does not COMPILE, here is the error) was the one it dropped. Negative control:
a near draft still measures identically (closeness 2, same residual rows); human mode unchanged.
- claude_wave_packs.py: renders that verdict, pointing the agent at the card's decl_prior block.
Coverage on wave r1 went 15/19 -> 19/19 packs carrying a measured verdict.
- wave_args.py (new): emits the claude_wave_draft.js args from <wave>/targets.json, asserting the
.s exists, that sub is exactly its parent dir, and that the pack exists. Written because I
hand-typed sub as 'ov_SC03_112/jr_80181D08' when the truth is
'asm/ov_SC03_112/nonmatchings/ov_SC03_112_jr_801817E0' (a stub's asm dir is named for its jr-carve
block, not itself) — all 19 agent oracles would have failed identically and read as a model
failure. Negative control: that exact string is REFUSED.
- draw_waves.py (new): draws waves off corpus.stubs cheapest-first, ledger-filtered, with
name-collision deferral (packs are name-keyed and refuse a duplicate). Re-measured the frontier:
the S65 tier map's '~557 cheap singletons (3-17 ins)' conflated one-member FAMILIES with small
functions — only 28 undrawn non-main stubs are <=17 ins; the bulk is 51-120 (258) and >120 (245).
Drew T