BFM-decomp/docs/decision-log.md

Decision & Pivot Log — the "why" behind BFM's strategic turns

Purpose. An append-only record of the project's STRATEGIC pivots, dead-ends, and reversals — the judgment behind major direction changes, captured WHILE FRESH (R31). This is the perishable layer the other records don't hold:

Record	Holds
phase-ends/PhaseEnd_*.md	per-phase build history + terse Deviations tables (WHAT changed, briefly)
docs/matching-cookbook.md	TECHNICAL idioms (asm↔C compiler quirks, tool recipes)
this file	STRATEGIC why: what we believed → what we tried that failed → why we turned → the hindsight "better path"

Why it exists. It is the substrate for two future deliverables (see the Phase-25 discussion, 2026-07-08):

1. the project retrospective — "with hindsight, the best way to have done this"; and
2. the public "how to AI-decomp a brand-new project" wiki at the public flip.

The quantitative curve (fleet % over time) is safe in git + the PhaseEnds forever; the reasoning — "we tried X, it was a dead end because Y, so we turned to Z" — is what evaporates between sessions. So it is logged here as it happens.

Discipline (R31 — confirmed by Drew 2026-07-08, Phase 25). Forward-only. Do NOT backfill historical pivots from compressed summaries — that reproduces exactly the low-quality reconstruction R30 exists to prevent (the PhaseEnds/cookbook already hold what was captured fresh at the time). Log each NEW strategic pivot during the session that produced it. Route TECHNICAL idioms to the cookbook; this file is for direction/judgment.

Entry format:

## [date] · Phase N — <pivot title>
- Context / belief: what we were doing and assumed.
- Dead-end (if any): what we tried that didn't work + the byte/measurement evidence.
- Pivot: what we changed to.
- Why: the grounded reason (bytes, measurement, constraint).
- Hindsight / for the wiki: the transferable lesson — what a from-scratch project should do.

---

2026-07-08 · Phase 25 — a fresh session nearly closed an OPEN phase (handoff-misread)

• Context / belief: resuming Phase 25, the CURRENT_PHASE.md handoff header read "finish T7 → Close; do NOT start T4 yet." I concluded the remaining tasks (T4/T5/T6 + the exemplar-cracking that is the phase's actual goal) were being deferred to Phase 26, and drove toward writing the PhaseEnd.
• Dead-end: I reframed the plan's core work as a "Phase-26 backlog" and presented a milestone-close for confirmation.
• Pivot: Drew corrected — T7 had been pulled ahead opportunistically (only its free/cheap MECHANICAL wins); "not yet" meant finish those first, not defer to next phase. The 127-draftable-family curriculum (T4→T5→T6→T7-cracking, the 6.7 MB byte-weight prize) remains this phase's substance. No PhaseEnd.
• Why: I anchored on the literal "→ Close" in a handoff header — a phrase written for one moment ("don't start T4 in THIS session") that I read as a permanent scope decision. The approved plan of record (plan-mode-…-galaxy.md) plainly lists T4–T7 as this-phase work with an open-ended milestone; reconciling the handoff against it first would have prevented the error.
• Hindsight / for the wiki: the #1 failure mode of a long multi-session AI project is a fresh session misreading a compressed handoff. What saved it: (a) an approved plan-of-record that outlives any single handoff, and (b) a human who caught it in one message. What to bake in: handoff headers must distinguish "not this session" from "not this phase" in unambiguous words; and a resuming session must reconcile the handoff against the plan-of-record before ever concluding a phase is done — never close on a handoff phrase alone. (This is why the plan-of-record and the two-gate model earn their keep.)

2026-07-08 · Phase 25 — the "mechanical" family sweep has a hard ceiling at TU-local type collisions

• Context / belief (T7.2): the h_norm structural-family remap is mechanical — crack one exemplar, lift the local types it references into the shared header, and every sibling overlay compiles + banks.
• Dead-end: lifting ALL overlay-split-file types into the fleet-wide engine_types.h broke the build — typedef Buf has a DIFFERENT layout in _a.c vs _after.c (they never clashed as separate .o TUs), and _a.c locally redefines PsyQ SDK names (MATRIX/VECTOR) that a fleet-wide lift would shadow.
• Pivot: lift only the collision-free subset (base + _after minus Buf); defer the conflicting families to per-type reconciliation (Phase 26). Banked 1,729 of the ~3,857 targeted — the rest is genuine work, not mechanical.
• Why: the overlay split files are independent translation units with independent local type namespaces; "share everything" is unsound across that boundary. (Technical detail → cookbook §40a.)
• Hindsight / for the wiki: know the mechanical ceiling before launching a mass pass. A cheap detect-collisions-first probe would have scoped the safe subset up front instead of discovering it via a failed build. General lesson: an automated bulk transform needs an explicit soundness boundary, and the byte-gate (not optimism) is what stops a partial success from masquerading as a full one.