BFM-decomp/cookbook/C0191.md

§176g — SIZE A WAVE BY INSTRUCTIONS, NOT BY CARDS (P31 S52 — the adopted doctrine)

The public metric is instruction-weighted, so a wave is worth what its instructions are worth — yet every campaign wave up to N was sized in cards, and drawn from the 12–42-ins cousin piles because those had the best seeds. That is ~1,400 ins/wave ≈ 0.011pp of fleet ⇒ ~440 waves to finish. Wave O carried 6,266 ins at the same gate cost and the same draft rate.

The draft rate barely decays with function size — this is the measurement that makes the whole doctrine work, and it was not obvious in advance:

wave	avg ins/card	standalone MATCH
M	51	98%
N	65	92%
O	128	96%

So mass is nearly free: the same agent, on a function 2.5× larger, matches about as often. Size the wave by --target-ins 6500 --min-ins 60 --max-ins 200, concentrated into ≤4 gate groups.

UNKNOWN IS NOT A DIFFICULTY LABEL. It means "the atlas could not name a lever", and it had been routed as needing its own bespoke lane. Wave O ran 22 UNKNOWN cards as an R37 probe: they drafted like any other lane. That is ~138k instructions — a quarter of everything open — reclassified as ordinary wave fuel by a single 22-card probe. Before building a lane for a labelled-hard pool, spend a probe asking whether it is actually hard.

With UNKNOWN included, 9,224 fns / 417,325 ins = 70% of all open instructions are agent- draftable, of which the 60–200-ins mass band alone is 164,357 ins ≈ 27 waves. Work that band first: it is where the instruction-weighted metric moves fastest per agent spent.

THE PRE-GATE PROTOCOL — five steps, each of which earned its place by catching something:

1. re-verify every claimed MATCH yourself with match_one (R14 — self-reports run optimistic);
2. reloc_identity --batch for symbol identity (§176e), which match_one cannot see;
3. gate_main DRY RUN, iterated until N -> N compatible, 0 dropped — conflicts surface one layer at a time and each fix reveals the next;
4. reconcile declarations toward the form the MATCH needs (§176f), then re-verify every converted draft — a declaration change is a codegen change;
5. gate: gate_main --apply for main (one clean rebuild per slate), gate_lane for overlays.