#15 — the tool worth building FIRST in any decomp, because it works at 0% and
compounds: run every question down TWO independent paths on a schedule and fail on
disagreement. Ten-plus S68 blockers had one shape — a tool computing a TRUE number
about a NARROWER world than we believed it covered — and EVERY one was caught by
two measurements disagreeing, never by review. R32/R34/R40 already say this and
were not enough: they are rules applied by whoever writes the tool, and in S68 I
wrote R34's warning into one docstring and rebuilt the exact defect it warns about
an hour later in another file.
Includes Drew's scheduling half, which this project only ever did by accident: the
widening is PERIODIC. Tooling is not wrong when written, it goes STALE as new
idioms reveal populations it cannot see. At every phase close ask 'which scanner's
denominator just got wider?' — that question converts new knowledge into free
banks. The §332 sweep is the worked example: one review, 10 fns / 1,027 ins
reclassified, one in-flight escalation stopped mid-spend.
generic-decomp-package.md — what a NEW decomp inherits on day one and does BEFORE
cracking: mine the COMPILER SOURCE and sibling projects for idioms (this project's
best late idioms came from reading gcc-2.7.2's own passes and needed no matched
function at all — week-1 work done in month N), port the families/twins/dedup/carve
layer first, then the oracle harness, and only then crack. With the honest caveat
that tooling-first makes the cheap half free and does NOT shrink the hard tail.
Drew T
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