BFM-decomp/phase-ends/CURRENT_PHASE.md

CURRENT PHASE — Phase 31: The Frontier Atlas & Wide-Tolerance Campaign

Started: 2026-08-14 · Plan approved: 2026-08-14 (gate 1; Drew) · Effort doctrine: xHigh default / Max deep (T5, T7, synthesis) / Ultracode waves (R26/R27 prompts) / Fable-tier only for new wall classes. Approved plan: /home/musashi/.claude/plans/fable-5-set-max-goofy-seahorse.md (the full design; this file is the crash-recovery log). Approval also ratified R37 (probe before costing), R38 (read recorded failure verdicts first), R39 (negative-control new refusal-checks) — now binding.

The re-charter (one paragraph)

Instead of roadmap-v2 P31's per-function grind, Phase 31 organizes the 12,059 remaining stubs (main 1,041 · resident 14 · ov 9,832 · md 1,179) into crack groups: a deterministic per-function feature layer + multi-tier similarity atlas (li-normalized exact tier, seed sweep vs the 2,719 matched skeletons, calibrated warm tier for the 3,238-unit cold tail + main, kNN neighborhood graph), evidence-joined to a lever label per group; plus widened mechanical lanes (LEN-tolerant aligned remap with a fully-mechanical LI class, §172b EXTPAIR/SELECT detectors + routing, PLUMBING campaign, permuter cluster warm-start, weak-seed cards); then a campaign loop to ceiling — deterministic $0 lanes first, agents only for exemplars, velocity-ledgered, closed on measured decay. Milestone shape = P30 (campaign to ceiling; every remaining stub on a named ledger at close). Main fully included from day one.

Task checklist

• T0 — Pivot log + freshness + hygiene — DONE 2026-08-14. (xHigh)
• T1 — Integration quick-bank sweep — DONE 2026-08-14 (pending final R22 log line). 8 banked, 0 agent tokens. (xHigh)
• T2 — References — DONE 2026-08-14. (xHigh)
• T3 — Main enablement — DONE 2026-08-14. (xHigh)
• T4 — atlas_features.py — DONE 2026-08-14. (xHigh)
• T5 — atlas.py — DONE 2026-08-14. THE ATLAS EXISTS. (Max)
• T6 — PLUMBING campaign — DONE 2026-08-14. +9 banked (probe 64%); recipe + 3 laws distilled (§173); sweep proved the no-draft majority routes to family lanes. (xHigh)
• T7 — family_align.py built + NC'd; the mechanical-cousin premise REFUTED by its probe (0/26) — engine re-scoped to T8's LEN+N same-function pile; no driver built (correctly). (Max)
• T8 — LEN+N lane — DONE 2026-08-14. Pile routed 587/587; 345 wrong-drafts reclassified; 49 permuter + 192 card fuel staged; mechanical lane = honest null. (xHigh)
• T9 — Warmstart + weak-cards — DONE 2026-08-14. Grinder queue armed (49 lenmiss + 10 seeded drafts, 120 refused by the stream filter); 954 weak-cards emitted, cheap-tier-dominated. No grinder patch needed. (xHigh)
• T10+ — Campaign loop to ceiling (repeating sessions; velocity ledger; close on measured decay). (Ultracode waves / xHigh orchestration / Fable new-walls)
• Tclose — PhaseEnd (gate 2). (Max)

Standing verification (every task)

R22 clean-fleet 213/213 after every banked batch · tools-health green · 0 NON_MATCHING (G4) · dedup-check 0 failed · R32 coverage assertions on every new scanner · R39 negative controls on every refusal check · R37 probes before pricing · R38 ledgers before experiments · commit per task (task + this log in the same commit; Drew pushes).

Progress log

• 2026-08-14 — Phase planned and approved (3 Explore + 2 Plan agents; full design in the plan file). Task list built (harness tasks #1–#12). T0 started.

• 2026-08-14 — T0 COMPLETE. (1) R31 decision-log entry (the re-charter WHY + R37–R39 ratification). (2) harvest_verify.py import guard: a bare import now RAISES instead of running a gate (verified both directions; CLI behavior unchanged). (3) Resident ±1 RESOLVED + FIXED: --bootstrap's linear partition had fused the +0 data word with func_800CEDFC (row 0x800CEDF8 nins=18) and dropped func_800D33E0 past a glued tail — the true denominator is 145 (progress was right, the sig wrong). sig-resident now ELF-seeds (S45 pattern: unique 4-aligned T-symbol addrs inside the resident_TEXT_START/END markers → exactly 145; bootstrap fresh-clone fallback). All three oracles now agree (sig 145 · corpus matched 131 · progress byte-ident 131); audit-corpus 0 PHANTOM + 0 TRUNCATED. (4) Family maps regenerated at HEAD commit:2161: 11,025 open non-main members = 12,059 − main's 1,034 EXACT (the stale map's 102 phantoms cleared); cousins totals now A-prop 1,125 / seeded 1,293 / cousin-multi 5,373 / cold 3,234 inst; adapt cards 704, aprop cards 204 (full emission). (5) Main fuel gap is DEAD: 2,001/2,002 main stubs have cached Ghidra-C (only func_80049600 missing) — the roadmap's "0/2,096" note was stale. (6) make tools-health → OK (dedup 2,063/0; C1 254,521/254,521; audit-digest confirms the fleet digest; resident fix moved instr num+denom by the same +9).

• 2026-08-14 — T1 COMPLETE: 8 banked for 0 agent tokens. R38-first: partitioned the MATCH-108 pile against current stubs (75 still open) and against the S50 gate history (62 gated-and-failed with verdicts · 13 never-gated). The lanes and their measured outcomes:

  • Never-gated 13 → gate_lane: 0/13, but the verdicts decomposed to 11× undefined reference to D_* = the §171 stale-seed-symbol class. Extended aprop_symfix with STALE-DELTA (n:n uniform-delta rebase; R39 synthetic + snapshot NCs, zero false positives; the delta test even refused a pair my hand-check wrongly accepted) → 4 rebased, 4/4 banked (func_8016BCC0, func_8017F1C8, func_80186BD8, func_80186BF8). Cookbook §171-D written in-session.
  • SELF-decl PLUMBING 7 → recover_integration --stages demacroize --max-tier binary: 4/7 banked (func_80139BE0, func_8014ED28, func_80161D88, func_801659DC); 3 stay near.
  • Stored-draft re-gates (no-verdict 7 + close=0 8 + diff 1 + 9 STALE→clean world-motion drafts): 0/23-ish banked — the ~8% A10 stored-verdict law held again; all re-verdicted fresh.
  • Handed forward with fresh classifications: CALLEE-decl 15 + CC1-FAIL 14 → T6 (cast-callees/tu-scope stages); UNDEF-DATA/OTHER 9 → the §171b-1 data-definition carry (T7/T8); md CARVE-REFUSED 8 → campaign side-quest ledger. immfix pile: fully consumed (0 open). fix20: 19/20 consumed in S50.
  • Tool fixes landed: gate_lane propagate-commit tag now derives from GATE_PHASE (was hardcoded phase-30 S49).
  • Rate lesson for the velocity ledger: fresh-fix lanes (STALE-DELTA 4/4, demacroize 4/7) vastly outperform blind stored re-gates (0/23) — the campaign loop's L2 ordering is confirmed by measurement.

• 2026-08-14 — T2 COMPLETE (references). (1) PsyQ dev-CD extracted: walked the on-disk Track-1 image (MODE2/2352) with the frozen tools/bfm_extract/iso9660.py (R33 — no new extractor; walker = iter_directory/read_extent with out-of-range extents skipped) → tools/reference/psyq-sdk/ (gitignored): 2,374 files / 231.6 MB, 400 C sources (373 in PSX/SAMPLE/ across CD/GRAPHICS/SOUND/MODULE/CMPLR/…); only 7 out-of-track .DA audio skipped. (2) Provenance find: GNU/SNGNUVER.TXT = SN Systems' gcc build history (2.7.2.SN32.3.7.0002, 14.5.97) with per-build changelog of SN's patches vs vanilla — only UNROLL.C (parameterised max unroll insns) is codegen-relevant; recorded in the idiom notes as the first-look suspect if a loop-unroll residual ever defies the vanilla model. (3) gcc-2.7.2 reference completed: +6 files from GNU ftp (calls.c + caller-save.c — both cited by §172's producer model, previously missing — + integrate/optabs/varasm/recog), tarball sha256 7cd8bce5… recorded. (4) docs/psyq-sample-idioms.md seeded (inventory, provenance, first style conventions, the lane hook); SETUP §5.6 rows added (R21).

• 2026-08-14 — T3 COMPLETE (main enablement). (1) sig_image seed-ends extension: --seeds now accepts 0xADDR NINS lines (and jsonl nins); a seeded nins is authoritative — the slice is exactly [addr, addr+4·nins), bypassing func_end (whose heuristic mis-sliced 3/40 main samples). (2) corpus.s_ins_count() factored from audit() (R33, one counter) + corpus.py <bin> --seed-ends CLI. (3) make sig-main: 2,002 main stubs signed at splat-true lengths → .run/sig.main.jsonl (deliberately splat-SEEDED — the atlas needs the boundaries a match must hit; NOT the independent second oracle, which stays deferred per docs/second-oracle.md). (4) Full word cross-check: 2,002/2,002 slices byte-faithful (EXE bytes vs .s comment-column words; 0 SLICE-SUSPECT; note the .s word field is byte-order hex, not the LE-decoded value — first checker draft compared wrong and read 1,999 false suspects). (5) family_remap main special-cases: vram_of('main') = code-segment vram − start from splat.us.exe.yaml = 0x8000F800; img_path('main') from the same yaml's target_path (R33). stream_words('main') == .s words on 25/25 samples. (6) Regression: sig-resident re-run byte-identical after the shared read_seeds change.

• 2026-08-14 — T4 COMPLETE (tools/atlas_features.py). Per-function features memoized per distinct h_exact (.run/feat_memo.json) and fanned out 1:1 with sigs to .run/feat.<bin>.jsonl ×213 (main reads the splat-true sig.main.jsonl; registry untouched). 363,525 rows / 92,855 distinct bodies in 21 s (vs the 3–6 min estimate). Features: nins/band · o0 prologue tell · frame/callee-saved set+order/fp · CFG skeleton (nblk/ncond/nback/ret_n via branch-target scan; jal = call, never an edge — position-independence proof in the docstring) · mid_jr/jalr · stable-call-sequence hash (fixed main+resident ranges) · reloc-kind sequence hash · 16-bucket ophist · §172b tells as importable shared functions (extpair/dupselect/sign_mix/magic_div — T8's len_tells imports these, R33) · li-normalized skeleton h_seqn (non-anchor lui dropped, ori→addiu class). Verifies: R32 join asserted per binary at write; determinism 0 mismatches on 200 re-derived bodies; mid_jr cross-check vs family_hseq's independent oracle: 6,444/6,444 exemplars agree (first verifier draft compared ZERO rows — a string-vs-int addr type mismatch, the R32 silent-no-op class caught in my own verifier; now indexed + fails loud if compared==0). o0-tell vs corpus.is_o0 on 13,019 open fns: 41 both / 94 tell-only = candidate undiscovered -O0 fns in -O2 TUs (§116 — o0_subsplit carve fuel for the campaign) / 14 src-only outliers.

• 2026-08-14 — T5 COMPLETE (tools/atlas.py + make atlas) — THE FRONTIER ATLAS EXISTS. Survey in 92 s, all assertions green: 5,139 groups cover ALL 12,058 open instances / 613,710 ins (12,058 = progress's 12,051 stubs + 7 NON_MATCHING exactly — the +1-blob and +8-banked discrepancies were both chased and resolved: data blobs excluded, T1 banks confirmed absent; main open reconciles to classify()'s stubs+NM with a hard assert). Tiers: calibration measured (positives = cousin ≥0.85-raw merges, negatives = size-matched cross-unit pairs; the li-normalized metric is so discriminative that recall ~99% holds down to 0.55; rule = smallest t with neg-accept ≤0.2% ∧ recall ≥95% → THRESH_WARM=0.70 at 99.1%/0.18% — chosen because a false warm-merge wastes an exemplar crack, a miss only routes cheaper) · T1.5 h_seqn 2 merges · warm tier 1,019 merges · seed sweep: 4,702/7,247 open skeletons (65%) carry a ≥0.55 matched seed from the 2.7k-skeleton pool · kNN graph (top-8 open + matched neighbors) · tiny-direct. Lever table (the strategic map): head-crack 1,283g/186.9k ins · UNKNOWN 1,964g/138.6k (honest) · extend-tell 575g/76.7k · redraft 46.8k · jtbl-carve 190g/45.7k · integration 575 inst/23.4k · seeded-crack 23.4k · len-vein 778 inst/16.8k · swaprepeat 9.2k · plumbing 161 inst/8.1k · o0-lane 6.6k · cc1 6.4k. Top group: 268 drifted single-member skeletons unified (per-location ~23-ins family, 0.72 seed). Evidence joins accounted (audit/backlog/ledgers/cards; residuals EXCLUDED-STALE until regenerated); --targets resolves 12/12 .s. make atlas = the full regen chain. docs/frontier-atlas.md committed.

• 2026-08-14 — T6 IN PROGRESS (PLUMBING campaign) — probe converged after two R14 corrections. plumbing_groups.py derived the honest pool: 237 still-open PLUMBING rows (the "1,217" was ledger-vintage inflation): SELF 109 (3 concentrated binaries) · CALLEE 48 · OTHER 48 · DATA 32. Probe (ov_SC03_107 SELF-21 → 14 with drafts): first run 0/14 with a PHANTOM shared error — root-caused to cross-group TU-edit poisoning (a demacroize edit in TU-A persists while TU-B's drafts gate; every whole-binary build compiles ALL TUs) → fixed recover_integration with per-group isolation (git-checkout binary TUs between groups, gate_lane's proven pattern; engine_core.h untouched so fleet-tier arity persists) + added the macro-externs draft stage (§121: one draft's guessed extern int f() vs the TU's DEFINE_-macro definition — lifted from family_sweep, R33) + tu-scope stage (§103 STU, the sweep-only lever). Isolated re-run exposed the TRUE class: undefined reference to D_* = the §171 stale-seed-symbol class (rtu_match MATCHes these drafts — it is blind to relocation names; the R34 two-oracle disagreement exactly as documented) → symfix-first: 11/11 rebased (mixed 1:1 + n:n deltas incl. the S49 Δ0x4128) → 9/14 banked (64%) where the raw path scored 0. The standing recipe: aprop_symfix --fix → recover_integration --stages macro-externs,demacroize,tu-scope (per-group isolated). Full sweep over the remaining ~200 rows now running.

• 2026-08-14 — T6 COMPLETE. Sweep over the remaining ~200 rows: the decisive finding is Law 3 (§173) — the biggest groups (ov_SC02_037 44 rows, most of ov_MAIN_012's 42) have zero stored drafts: their PLUMBING verdicts came from transient family-sweep remaps never persisted to the backlog. A recovery lane can only recover what was stored — verdict-only rows are family-lane fuel (already atlas-labeled), not recovery fuel; the true stored-draft class was largely consumed by the probe (9 banked, 64%). Singleton tail with drafts: 0/~20 (fresh per-fn verdicts recorded). Cookbook §173 (symfix-first · per-group isolation · verdicts-without-drafts) + index regenerated (518). R22 clean fleet: 213/213 with all T6 banks. Phase total so far: 17 banked, 0 agent tokens (stubs 12,059 → 12,042).

• 2026-08-14 — T7 COMPLETE (honest refutation). tools/family_align.py built: aligned classifier (SequenceMatcher over FC.tok; LEN-LI/LEN-NOP/LEN-JTBL/LEN-STRUCT/STRUCT-ALIGNED/PURE/IMM verdicts) + li-cluster reconstructor (with the split-cluster absorb for the rs-changed addiu partner) + the aligned imm engine. NC-1: 157/157 verdict-equivalence with classify_member on banked pairs — the NC itself caught two real classifier gaps (R-type non-shift sa = STRUCT; registers tested BEFORE the reloc skip — a reloc-slot word with a different register is STRUCT). NC-2 parity 21/21. The R37 probe then killed the planned driver before it was built: 0/26 LI-ONLY cards classify mechanically (regfields drift ×19) — cousins are 0.85-similar DIFFERENT functions; §168 law 1 ("a cousin is a seeded crack, never a remap") re-derived by measurement. The engine's true consumer is T8's LEN+N pile (draft vs its own target = same function). Parked for T8: the reloc-vs-constant range discriminator for lui-bearing clusters. Decision-log entry written (R31).

• 2026-08-14 — T8 COMPLETE (LEN+N lane). Built: match_one --emit-streams (additive, stdout-identity NC'd) · family_align.addr_true_rel (the reloc-vs-constant range discriminator — full conservative set kept for pair semantics/NC-1 [157/157 regression], address-true subset for indel eligibility; synthetic probes: lui-bearing constant cluster now LEN-LI, address-anchored indel still refuses) · tools/len_tells.py (per-draft aligned classification + §172b tell tagging on target-side indels, detectors imported from atlas_features R33, cookbook text embedded in cards) · tools/lenmiss_route.py (pool-parallel per A8: 587 audit LEN rows re-verified live and routed in 24 s). Routing: redraft 345 (frac>0.35 — the draft is not the function; reclassified APPEND-ONLY in the backlog, so near-miss metrics stop lying) · permuter-length 49 (|Δ|≤2 clean drift — grinder fuel) · cards 192 incl. 14 EXTPAIR/SELECT/NOP-tagged (the audit's own detectors had emitted zero — these are new signal) · mechanical 0 — an honest null: stored drafts rarely get CONSTANTS wrong (agents copy them from asm); LEN drift is shape, so the LI-cluster swap lane has no fuel in this pile and family_align's value here is the classifier/detector. R32 accounting 587/587.

• 2026-08-14 — T9 COMPLETE. tools/warmstart.py (the permuter/grinder FEEDER): --from-banked walks a banked exemplar's h_seq family's still-open members, builds remapped proven-body drafts (symbol_map + aprop_autodraft.build_draft, refusing on reloc-count mismatch), stream-classifies member-vs-seed with ZERO compiles (masked_diff-shaped dicts from ground-truth bytes → residual_class.classify_streams), enqueues ONLY permuter-shaped (bucket==permuter or LENGTH-DRIFT |Δ|≤2) as backlog near-records; --lenmiss ingests T8's 49-route. Grinder patch NOT needed (its candidates() deliberately keeps unclassified records — "unknown is not a reason to skip" — so pre-filtered enqueues flow as-is; documented in the feeder's docstring). Armed live: 49 + 10 enqueued, 120 refused by the stream filter (the anti-92%-wasted-CPU discipline working). family_cousins --weak-cards: 954 units (the 0.70–0.85 annotate-only band, never before consumed) as seeded-crack cards, ins-ranked, §168 laws embedded, model-routed haiku 804 / v3 43 / sonnet 86 / opus 21 (cheap tiers dominate — the token-efficiency shape), 0 unresolved .s.

SESSION S54 (2026-08-17, ultracode) — wave T + the pre-gate ladder learns to see overlays

• 2026-08-17 — Session opened with the §180 leftover sweep, before drafting anything new. scan_leftovers.py over 644 stored drafts in 5 binaries: 29 byte-perfect, still-stubbed drafts = 2,478 instructions (main 3/217 · ov_SC04_011 15/1,392 · ov_SC02_005 5/261 · ov_SC06_029 5/521 · ov_SC03_028 1/87), plus 39 honest NEAR. Zero agent tokens. reloc_identity --batch: 29/29 AGREE. fragment_check: 1 FAIL — gfx2D_BG0_OBJ_4D8 owns .L80050D5C, which gfx2D_BG0_OBJ_1B4 branches into (the §181 mirror class; it is also a GsSortBg fragment-merge target, so it routes there).

• 2026-08-17 — Wave T built and launched (71 cards / 6,557 ins / 5 gate groups / 14.2 drafts per rebuild), and the selector learned two new principles. make atlas first (it predated 161 banks): 4,836 groups / 11,183 open instances / 563,916 ins. Then two additions to build_wave_atlas.py:

  • --one-per-gid — a fleet-wide draw over SIBLING overlays fills half a wave with the SAME skeleton at two addresses (the naive draw put 22 of 44 groups in twice), paying an agent for work family_sweep --hseq does free behind the banked exemplar. Collapse to one card per atlas group, defer the siblings to <out>.siblings.json, assert reps + siblings == candidates (R32).
  • --rank total — rank gate groups by the mass a card DELIVERS (its own instructions plus its deferred siblings'), not by face mass. Measured on this draw: face 6,509 ins with 9,985 sibling ins behind 57 gids under --rank mass, versus 6,557 ins with 12,709 sibling ins behind 69 of 71 gids under --rank total. Wave T's potential is 19,266 instructions for 71 agents. R39 negative control: on a pool with unique gids, --one-per-gid output is byte-identical. The wave prompt carries the S53 harvest as laws 8-20 (§183.1/§183.3, §186, §186b, §186c, §189-A..E, §190-A..C), STEP 0 (the cross-overlay magic-literal grep), a per-card sibling note, and a new Reconcile phase: one agent per gate group runs the deterministic ladder over its own slate and resolves the refusals with the §183 playbook — reconciliation moved INSIDE the wave (§176h.C2).

• 2026-08-17 — §192: the pre-gate ladder was main-only and said "clean" about it. Running pregate_check on an overlay slate printed checking 0 substituted file(s) ... clean. Three defects, all fixed with controls: (1) resolve_conflicts/substitute hardcoded corpus.stubs('main') → per-binary _stubs_for() (main path byte-identical); (2) sym_of returned void for every extern void (*D_x[])(...) → 192 phantom CONFLICTING-EXTERNs; project symbols now matched by name, keywords excluded, declarator read explicitly — NC over 5,526,100 declarations: 189,301 changed verdicts, 0 regressions; (3) void f() vs void f(void) were collapsed together → 40 more phantoms; C89's unspecified-parameter rule is now gate_main.sig_conflict (7 synthetic controls). Same slate now reports 2 failures, both real. Plus §192b: the tool REFUSES when it substituted 0 files, and prints one [DROP] line per rejected draft — the drop reasons were being computed and discarded while the tool printed "worth a rebuild".

• 2026-08-17 — Leftover-recovery lane launched (5 agents, one per binary): each gets its slate, its TU, and the deterministic [DROP]/refusal evidence, and applies the §183 playbook draft-side only.

• 2026-08-17 — WAVE T: 71 cards -> 70 MATCH -> 70 BANKED, zero drops in five gate groups. 87 agents, 8.71M tokens, 0 errors, ~70 min. The only structural change from wave S was the Reconcile phase: one agent per gate group runs reconcile_slate --apply -> §183 playbook -> pregate_check over its OWN slate, re-verifying every edit with match_one, BEFORE the first rebuild (§176h.C2 says reconciliation belongs inside the wave; this is that, automated). Wave R banked 18 of 45 on its first slate; wave T dropped nothing. Selector changes that made the pool worth more per agent: --one-per-gid (the naive draw duplicated 22 of 44 skeletons across sibling overlays) and --rank total (rank gate groups by card + deferred-sibling mass). Potential 19,266 ins for 71 agent-slots; 49 siblings (4,954 ins) then banked mechanically via family_sweep --hseq.

• 2026-08-17 — The §180 leftover pile: 24 banked for ~0 drafting tokens. 644 stored drafts re-verified -> 29 byte-perfect and still stubbed; reloc_identity 29/29 AGREE; fragment_check 1 FAIL (gfx2D_BG0_OBJ_4D8, the §181 mirror class, routed to the fragment-merge lane). A 5-agent §183 lane reconciled them draft-side; gates: ov_SC04_011 14/15 · ov_SC06_029 4/4 · ov_SC03_028 1/1 · ov_SC02_005 4/5 (after a 3-typedef hoist in its TU, null-control-built byte-identical first) · main 1 (the second is func_80031A98, the known D_800C5328 wall).

• 2026-08-17 — §192 + four over-refusals: the pre-gate ladder was main-only and said "clean" about it. pregate_check on an overlay slate printed checking 0 substituted file(s) ... clean. Fixed, each with controls: per-binary _stubs_for() (main path byte-identical); sym_of no longer returns the keyword void for extern void (*D_x[])(...) (NC: 5,526,100 declarations, 189,301 changed verdicts, 0 regressions); C89's unspecified-parameter rule as gate_main.sig_conflict; the overlay DRIVER's typedef transform modelled (harvest_verify strips TU-provided typedefs, gate_main hoists); block-scope typedefs skipped; M2C_UNK and friends derived from include/common.h as scalar aliases (R33). A cc1 probe settled the builtin case: two conflicting memcpy decls are a WARNING (exit 0), the same pair on a non-builtin is an error. §192b: the tool now REFUSES when it substituted 0 files and prints the per-draft [DROP] reasons it used to compute and discard.

• 2026-08-17 — Harvest: 71 index_gaps -> 9 CONFIRMED laws (§193-A..I), 5 REJECTED, 61 ALREADY COVERED. 19 agents (5 cluster readers + one adversarial verifier per candidate, defaulting to REJECT). The 61 is the actionable number: the cookbook knew and the agents did not find it. §193-A is the cause and the fix — a card's exemplar/sibs come from the atlas's OPEN set by construction (atlas.py:96 load_open, :657 max over open members) = 0/34 banked measured, 0% at any maturity, while atlas.py:505-536 already computes a MATCHED-pool twin whose identity build_wave_atlas discarded. Cards now carry seed_ref + matched_n (control draw: seed_ref banked 4/4, exemplar 0/12). §193-B byte-refutes §43's cast absolute (the decider is combine.c:929's cross-call guard); §193-G refutes §164-54's ">=4 arms" bound (balance_case_nodes splits at i > 2); §193-C bounds §8/§48-A1's cross-jump refund to TAILS (gcc-2.7.2 has no prefix merge).

• 2026-08-17 — R22 clean-fleet: make clean + extract-all (212/212 + main) + check-all = 213 passed / 0 failed of 213, EXE 143dbb89 unchanged. Fleet 95.7% instr-weighted · 91.0% distinct-code · 96.96% fn-count; MAIN 20.5%. Session total: 143 functions banked (70 wave + 49 mechanical + 24 leftovers), of which only 70 cost an agent.

SESSION S53 (2026-08-16, ultracode) — wave R + the leftover-draft harvest

• 2026-08-16 — S53-1 PREFLIGHT + ATLAS REGEN. Tree clean at commit:2416, no gate in flight. make atlas regenerated at HEAD (the S52 atlas predated waves P+Q, whose banks grew main's matched seed pool 175→293): 4,985 groups / 11,352 open instances / 579,571 ins, warm merges 880, seeded 4,714/6,911 skeletons, all assertions green. (Watch-for confirmed live: my own pgrep -f atlas waiter self-matched its shell wrapper — the bracket trick is mandatory.)

• 2026-08-16 — S53-2 LEFTOVER-DRAFT HARVEST (R38: read the recorded verdicts before designing anything). .run/s53_scan_leftovers.py re-verified every wave-P/Q main draft on disk with match_one rather than trusting the journals (R14). Of 141 drafts: 72 are already banked (their .s is gone — the honest signal that splat stops emitting a matched function), 34 still verify MATCH and are still stubs (3,075 ins of finished work nobody had banked), 35 are NEAR. Oracle cross-check: all 34 MATCH and all 35 NEAR are in corpus.stubs('main'); all 72 ERROR are not. Zero agent tokens.

• 2026-08-16 — S53-3 PRE-GATE LADDER ON THE FREE SLATE (the S52 protocol, applied cold). reloc_identity --batch: 33 AGREE / 1 MISMATCH (func_80034C24 names D_80078F20 where the target references cdReq_sectorHdrBuf+0xE0; its --dry-fix rename to D_80078F10 is unverified, so it was dropped, not guessed). fragment_check: 1 FAIL — MoveImage DEFINES SYS_OBJ_8F4, a stub that still has its own .s (exactly the enclosing-function trap that cost wave Q a 3-hour bisect; caught in milliseconds). reconcile_slate --apply on the pruned 32: 11 compatible, 21 refused as human decisions (7 TYPE, 5 SIGNATURE, 3 DIFFERENT-STRUCT, 3 BROKE-MATCH, 1 DEF-SIDE-RETURN, 1 resourceIdMap TYPE, 1 alias). The 11 were NOT gated on their own — §176h.C2 says banking a subset hardens the rest's conflicts (last session: 1 of 18 parked drafts survived that), so all 32 ride one slate after repair.

• 2026-08-16 — S53-4 WAVE R BUILT — and the main mass band is measurably SPENT. build_wave_atlas --only-bins main --min-ins 60 --max-ins 200 --rank mass returned 917 ins / 10 cards against a 6,500 target: waves O/P/Q consumed main's mass band. Probes (R37 before costing): main widened to 30–400 yields 44 cards / 4,600 ins in 10 gate groups; fleet-wide 60–200 yields 63 cards / 6,525 ins in exactly 2 gate groups = 31.5 drafts per rebuild, from a 1,546-candidate well. Wave R therefore = the fleet-wide draw (ov_SC06_029 ×41, ov_SC02_005 ×22) + main's last 10 mass cards, 7,442 ins across 73 fresh cards.

• 2026-08-16 — S53-5 WAVE R LAUNCHED (110 agents, 3 lanes, run wf_c070b4fa-53b). Lane 1 = 73 fresh mass cracks. Lane 2 = the 21 declaration-blocked drafts (already byte-MATCH; the agent's job is to make the DRAFT agree with the TU, never the reverse, then re-verify — a declaration change is a codegen change). Lane 3 = 16 near-miss repairs, whose residuals were classified deterministically first: 10 of 16 are the §177 epilogue signature (addiu $sp / jr $ra / nop vs jr $ra / addiu $sp, all in 800c3), 4 SCHEDULE-REORDER, 1 BRANCH-POLARITY, 1 OPCODE-MIXED. The prompt carries §177 as law 4 and §178's "REGALLOC-PERM is the most over-diagnosed class" as law 5.

• 2026-08-16 — S53-6 WAVE R DRAFTED: 92/110 MATCH (84%), 0 agent errors, 134 agents. Per lane: mass 68/73 (93%) · plumbing 20/21 (95%) · near-miss 4/16 (25%). 5 IMMOVABLE, 13 NEAR. Two of the IMMOVABLEs are real structural findings, not failures: gfx2D_BG1_OBJ_648 is the shared tail of GsSortFastBg (no prologue; branched into three times by raw bnez/j), and vmNoiseOn is one compiled function the splitter cut into seven glabels (one prologue at 0x800403A4, its only matching epilogue in VM_NO1_OBJ_4A4, plain j at every hop). Both need a TU-level merge, not a draft.

• 2026-08-16 — S53-7 BANKED 75 FUNCTIONS / 7,400 INSTRUCTIONS. main 18 (stubs 1,763 → 1,745, EXE 143dbb89 byte-identical) · ov_SC06_029 36 of 41 · ov_SC02_005 21 of 26. R22 clean-fleet after: check-all 213 passed, 0 failed of 213.

• 2026-08-16 — S53-8 THE GATE'S REJECTION CENSUS (cookbook §181) — 26 of 27 blocked main drafts are byte-correct. Five classes, four of which the whole C-level ladder is blind to: MIRROR-FRAGMENT ×2 (a sibling branches to a .L label inside the function; only the linker knows) · duplicate typedef with the TU's copy BELOW the insertion point ×7 (gate_main reuses only definitions ABOVE, so it keeps the draft's and C89 rejects the pair) · draft-vs-draft data-symbol type clash ×1 (ClearOTag says u32 D_80072784, SetGraphQueue says function pointer) · draft-vs-file signature conflict ×4 · genuinely byte-wrong ×1 (SYS_OBJ_1DC0). bisect_slate found that one in 5 steps / 90 s at 13 s per build — against gate_main's built-in bisect's 3 hours and no answer.

• 2026-08-16 — S53-9 TOOLS: the mirror test now exists. fragment_check.branched_into() refuses a draft that owns a label a still-stubbed sibling branches to; negative-controlled on both known-bad drafts, then measured: 99 of 1,745 main stubs (5.7%) carry this hazard, 0 of 229 in ov_SC04_011 and 0 of 194 in ov_SC03_028 — a main-specific trap at ~1 in 18. Also fixed pregate_check to scan comment-MASKED text (_typedefs(text) counted a typedef quoted in a bank note as a definition; negative-controlled three ways). Cookbook §180/§180d/§181/§182 banked.

• 2026-08-16 — S53-10 THE RECOVERY BACKLOG WORKED: 15 of the 27 blocked drafts banked, and the blockers turned into TOOLING. A 20-agent lane reconciled 18/20 while keeping the match; the gate then took them in three rounds as each fix exposed the next layer. Banked: 3 (typedef hoist) + 10 (declaration reconciliation) + 2 (byte-neutral TU edits) + 2 (forward-typedef fix) = 17 more main functions this session (stubs 1,763 → 1,728). Every gate green at 143dbb89.

• 2026-08-16 — S53-11 FOUR TOOL DEFECTS FIXED, ALL FOUND BY THE WORK ITSELF (§184/§185). (a) Comment-blindness in THREE tools — pregate_check._typedefs scanned raw text (a typedef quoted in a bank note counted as a definition), reconcile_slate._same_struct and gate_main.strip_dup_typedefs compared body TEXT (so Slot16B vs Slot16 — same seven fields — read as DIFFERENT-STRUCT, and an identical struct got renamed into a conflict). Agents annotate every field with its address; the TU does not. All three now mask comments; negative-controlled. (b) The forward typedef — typedef struct X X; is not a competing definition; renaming it manufactured the very extern conflict it was meant to avoid. Recognized and stripped now. (c) gate_main hoists TU typedefs above the include block (with a dependency closure) so a draft above the TU's definition can reuse it — proven byte-neutral by the SHA, 5–10 typedefs moved per gate. (d) pregate_check recalibrated: ANY return-type disagreement now FAILs (G4P * under a G3P * declaration was rejected by gcc after the tool WARNed), and it now sees brace-bodied externs (extern struct { ... } *D_x; vs void * — the clash that cost a rebuild).

• 2026-08-16 — S53-12 THREE TU RETYPES PROVEN BYTE-NEUTRAL, ONE REFUTED (§185). func_8001ABBC void→s32; W16 D_80076240→Slot16A[]; W32 D_8007622C→s32[] — each verified by a clean rebuild at 143dbb89. REFUTED: s16 D_800C5328[]→[][2] compiles at the declaration and then breaks four banked assignments in two other functions. The rule that fell out: a TU retype is byte-neutral only if every existing USE SITE still compiles unchanged — and prefer editing the draft, which verifies in seconds, over the TU, which costs a rebuild and risks the whole file.

• 2026-08-18 — WAVE W: 71/71 drafted, 68 banked in THREE gate groups — and the draw exposed that the SELECTOR had been overriding the DOCTRINE. The first draw came up short (63 cards / 5,647 ins / 10 groups, continuing 5 -> 7 -> 9), so I probed the atlas instead of accepting it: UNKNOWN held 607 of the 1,179 in-band members — more than every other lane COMBINED — and build_wave_atlas's default --levers excluded it, while the wave PROMPT tells every agent "UNKNOWN does NOT mean hard — it means the atlas could not name a lever ... UNKNOWN cards draft like any other lane (measured across waves O-S)". Redrawn with UNKNOWN in: 73 cards / 6,500 ins in 3 GATE GROUPS = 24.3 drafts per rebuild (T 14.2 · U 10.4 · V 7.8). Result: 71/71 of the agents that ran matched (2 died on server rate-limiting and are released back to the pool), 68 banked (ov_SC03_105 26/26 · md_SC07_004 34/36 · ov_SC06_006 8/8 — the first MODULE binary drafted this session). UNKNOWN is now a DEFAULT lane (§198). Recorded cost: zero siblings — UNKNOWN groups are mostly singletons, so the free remap that gave T/U/V 49/34/25 gave W nothing. Concentration and sibling mass trade against each other; pick per wave.

• 2026-08-18 — §196 decl_prior: the card now carries the fleet's declaration consensus. Chosen by measurement, not intuition: wave V's tokens are 88.3% drafting / 8.4% repair / 3.2% reconcile at 9.3 match_one compiles per agent, so the lever is what a drafter must GUESS before its first compile. Two such guesses are answered in the tree — callee arity/return type (§195-A: the asm has NO tell either way, the procedure is a two-arity A/B) and global type (every CONFLICTING-EXTERN drop). tools/decl_prior.py indexes 4,162 files -> 67,094 symbols (9,739 with a banked DEFINITION); cards carry the rows for their own target's symbols, ranked DEF > TU (authoritative, law 2) > FLEET modal + rivals with counts. I did NOT build the offset-width prior I first sketched: the .s already gives access width unambiguously (lh/lhu/lw), so it would have been redundant. Structs deferred to the readability pass per Drew.

• 2026-08-18 — §197 harvest (4 confirmed / 3 rejected / 41 already-covered), and one entry is banked CONTESTED. Two verifiers confirmed the same phenomenon (lhu ; sll 16 ; sra 16+K where the target has lh ; sra K) and attributed it to DIFFERENT passes — cse's fold_rtx associative block (with -da dumps showing the middle insn already gone in x.i.cse) vs combine preferring the count-merge. R34 forbids reading agreement between disagreeing oracles as corroboration, so the tell and the cure (a zero-byte asm re-tie; a FRESH TEMP works with no second SET at all) are banked and the pass question is recorded open. Both verifiers independently byte-refuted §136 type-form rule 9's cure: u16 v[4] and SVECTOR v compile byte-identically in rule 9's own context.

• 2026-08-18 — WAVE X: 64/65 drafted, 62 banked in 4 gate groups; UNKNOWN confirmed as a lane on its second wave. md_SC07_003 24/24 · ov_SC06_016 18/18 · ov_SC06_025 19/20 · ov_SC03_001 1/1. A SECOND module binary went clean. Sibling remap 1 (UNKNOWN groups are singletons — the recorded cost of the lane). R22 213/213 from a clean tree. Fleet crossed 96.0% instr-weighted (91.6% distinct, 97.05% fn-count). The one near-miss, func_8017F9D8, sits at closeness 1 — 93 of 94 words byte-identical, a branch landing one instruction early — and its agent got there from 21 by reading each delay slot as a PROVENANCE fact (§194-M) rather than as scheduling noise: a bgtz + filler that moved BACKWARD proves the statement DOMINATES the branch, so it belongs above the test, not inside the arm. The session's own harvest being used mid-wave.

• 2026-08-18 — §199 harvest (7 confirmed / 2 rejected / 56 already-covered) — and it BYTE-REFUTES §189-A, banked this morning. §189-A claimed an interloper between a split constant's lui/ori PROVES two source steps. Four independent refutations: the banked one-statement slice prim.col[1] = 0x101010; compiles with SEVEN insns in the gap; the prescribed two-step spelling is BYTE-IDENTICAL (the fix is inert); moving an unrelated statement moves a third constant in and out of the gap; and one separated pair is 0x88888889 — gcc's own reciprocal magic for / 0x3C, a constant with NO source spelling, so the inference is unsatisfiable there. Mechanism corrected off cc1's -dS: rank_for_schedule tests INSN_PRIORITY FIRST (sched.c:2395), the LUID tie-break is last (:2428), and the separator is the BIRTHING BOOST (birthing_insn_p, gate reg_n_sets == 1) which the split pair can never have because try_split gives its pseudo two sets. The dump also corrected the READER: sched1 is a BACKWARD scheduler, so the LUI sinks, not the ORI. §189-A's split-TIMING half survives and carries a banner. Two of the seven laws correct laws from earlier the same day — that is the adversarial verifier paying for itself.

• 2026-08-18 — Usage-limit recovery, third use, reliable. The wave-X harvest died mid-flight with 3 verifiers outstanding. Workflow({scriptPath, resumeFromRunId, args}) replayed 10 finished agents from cache and re-ran only the 3: 398k tokens against the original run's 1.31M.

• 2026-08-18 — WAVE Y: 69/70 drafted, 72 banked (64 gate + 4 recovery + 4 siblings). Groups: ov_SC03_007 20/21 · ov_SC03_121 14/14 · ov_SC02_017 15/19 · ov_SC03_001 12/12 · ov_SC05_018 3/3. R22 213/213 twice (before and after the recovery lane). Fleet 96.0% instr-weighted · 91.7% distinct · 97.07% fn-count. One reconcile agent died on a server error, so I built that group's slate from the drafts on disk and ran the ladder by hand — which is exactly why the Reconcile phase's product is a FILE, not an agent return value.

• 2026-08-18 — §200 — THE ALIAS IS THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION ESCAPE, and it was found because the API went down. Wave Y's recovery lane lost 12 agents to two rounds of 529 Overloaded (0 tokens), so the five gate drops were fixed BY HAND — and five different refusal classes turned out to need ONE move. §183's playbook negotiates with the TU's spelling; §200 declines to share the C identifier at all: only the LINK name has to agree, so bind a private identifier to the symbol with gcc's asm label (§37/§124). extern u8 aD8018A800[] __asm__("D_8018A800");. Classes recovered: array-vs-scalar where reconcile_slate's own array fix had BROKEN the match · a slate-mate's private struct · void * vs s32 · and TWO DEF-side return conflicts (one of them a function whose only in-TU use takes its ADDRESS as a callback) — the case §183.3 says has no cast escape. All five still MATCH; 4 re-gated and banked. Ordering recorded so it stays an escape hatch: adopt the TU's spelling → cast at the use site → alias. Every alias in the tree carries a comment naming the spelling it could not use.

• 2026-08-18 — THIRD INSTANCE OF THE §192 CLASS, on our own idiom. sym_of returned __asm__ as the symbol for every asm-label alias (an identifier followed by (, matched before the real one), so aliased declarations all collided under that name — 1 byte-verified draft DROPPED and 2 phantom CONFLICTING-EXTERNs on the very slate the recovery lane was fixing. NC over the tree: 1,210 changed verdicts, 0 regressions, 899 of them one symbol — the idiom is fleet-wide, so the miscount was too. A project idiom the tools cannot parse is an idiom that silently costs work.

• 2026-08-18 — WAVE Z IS BUILT AND STAGED, DELIBERATELY NOT LAUNCHED (Drew's instruction). 75 cards / 6,517 ins / 8 gate groups (9.4 drafts per rebuild) · seed_ref 46 · tu_ref 50 · decl_prior 70 · 43 siblings staged. Binaries: ov_SC02_005 20 · ov_SC01_084 16 · ov_SC05_001 11 · ov_SC03_011 10 · ov_SC03_094 8 · md_MAIN_034 7 · md_SC03_075 2 · ov_SC06_018 1. To fire it: Workflow({scriptPath: ".run/wave_p31z_workflow.js", args: <the object in .run/wave_z_args.json>}) Cards .run/wave_z_cards.json, siblings .run/wave_z_cards.siblings.json, wavedir .run/wave_p31z.

• 2026-08-18 — ⚠ WAVE Y'S HARVEST IS OUTSTANDING — the API is 529-Overloaded for subagents. Three separate launches lost every agent at spawn (12 recovery + 5 readers), all at zero tokens. The gap reports are captured at .run/wave_y_gaps.json (67 of them) and the targets are snapshotted at .run/waveY_asm_snapshot/, so nothing is lost. Resume with: Workflow({scriptPath: ".run/wave_y_harvest_workflow.js", resumeFromRunId: "wf_ef996308-610", args: <the object in .run/wave_y_harvest_args.json>}) This is the ONLY step of the seven-step wave-closing sequence left undone for wave Y.

• 2026-08-18 — WAVE Z FIRED AND CLOSED (S56). 127 banked; R22 213/213; fleet 96.1 / 91.8 / 97.11. Wave Z (wf_3a3c6273-f82, 75 cards / 6,517 ins / 8 gate groups, 93 agents, 0 errors, 81 min): 74/75 standalone MATCH, 0 immovable, 73 reconciled onto slates, 72 banked on the first gate.

  • Recovery, 2 for 2, zero agent tokens. func_800CC310 (md_MAIN_034) — match_one MATCH but the whole-binary gate refused. reloc_identity AGREE (13 relocs); a disassembly of the built .elf read 69/69 identical and was an artifact — the draft never compiled, so the .elf still held the original INCLUDE_ASM bytes. The verdict was already on disk in .run/harvest_failed.md_MAIN_034.classified.txt: PLUMBING: parse error before 'D_800CCAD0' (R38 — reading it first would have cost one command instead of three oracles). Cause: slate-mate func_800CC4E8 banked a Quad4_800CCB14 typedef, strip_provided_typedefs correctly dropped func_800CC310's duplicate, and func_800CC310 splices EARLIER in address order — survivor below its uses. First fix (rename to dodge the stripper) was WRONG and the gate caught it: one symbol, two types. Hoisting the typedef to the top of the TU banked it (commit:2558). Cookbook §203. Correction (same session): the text that banked is the RENAMED variant — gate_stage's backlog.save_draft() overwrote the original draft on the failed attempt, so "copying the original back" copied the rename. Bytes are correct (R22 213/213); the TU carries two names for one shape and a transform mangled a COMMENT. A backlog draft path is not a stable original. func_8018280C (ov_SC05_001) — the reconciler's IMMOVABLE §183.3 DEF-SIDE-RETURN wall (asm proves s32, TU declares void at three sites with live callers). The §200 alias applied to a DEFINITION — s32 aF8018280C(s32) __asm__("func_8018280C") — banked first try (commit:2559), body untouched. Cookbook §202; the idiom existed in-tree only on declarations.
  • Sibling sweep: 3, then 50 — the difference was MY scoping error, not the tree. The first family_sweep --hseq passed the ATLAS gid-exemplar addresses to --only, which filters on family_hseq's OWN exemplar addr; with the default --band substantial that left 2 families / 4 candidates. Recomputed from the manifest: 59 families contain a wave-Z function, 21 with a matched exemplar and 196 open members. Re-swept --band all: 50 banked / 91 failed / 60 skipped (45 STRUCT-class, 12 unresolved-immediates, 3 not-stub). §53's "a 0% from the wrong tool is not evidence", one level up: a small yield from a mis-scoped sweep is not evidence either.
  • R22 make check-all = 213 passed / 0 failed of 213 from a clean tree. dedup-check 2,165/0; C1 254,731/254,731; 0 NON_MATCHING in any default build (G4). Fleet 96.1% instr-weighted / 91.8% distinct-code / 97.11% fn-count / MAIN 20.5% (session start 96.0 / 91.7 / 97.07), 10,501 stubs open. Honest ratio: 74 agent-drafted fns moved instr-weighted ~0.1pt; the 53 mechanical siblings cost ~0 tokens. Draw exemplars that carry siblings.
  • Harvest (wf_5508f6b2-fae, 16 agents): 82 gap reports -> 30 already-covered, 31 confirmations, 5 laws, 16 rejected. The adversarial verifier killed 7 of 12 law claims — two on byte-false mechanisms it reproduced itself, five as re-derivations of existing §§. The synthesizer corrected three wrong line citations, narrowed §204-A's instruction delta from a claimed +4 to a measured +1 by re-running the A/B, and flagged a miscite. §204 written, 510 lines (§204-A..E + CONFIRMED + REJECTED).
  • Tooling (all negative-controlled). (1) The S46 validity gate was OFF the path for waves T-Z — it lives in wave_snapshot.py, which hardcodes asm/<bin>/nonmatchings/<bin>/ and so found 9 of 75 split-TU targets; its R32 assertion fired correctly, the snapshot step got hand-rolled, and the phantom-target gate went with it. Wired validate_targets into build_wave_atlas where cards are BORN (--allow-invalid escape), widened _key to the card spelling fn, and documented the PRE-DRAFT-ONLY constraint in the tool: every verdict reads live sig/stub/.s state, so the same check after a wave condemns exactly the targets that BANKED (an R39 refusal-check run at the wrong moment). (2) wave_snapshot now honors the card's sub (NC: 9/9 legacy targets byte-identical, 66/66 split-TU targets recovered). (3) §204-E fixed: decl_prior._ASM_SYM's leading \b bound to the whole alternation, demanding a word boundary before % — impossible in a .s — so the %hi/%lo arm had NEVER fired (0 of 1,210 over four waves). NC over the 75 wave-Z targets: jal 306 -> 306, zero regressions; data 0 -> 299 symbols recovered.
  • Flow hardening after Drew asked whether the findings were actually wired in (S56). The audit found three gaps beyond the four fixes already committed: (a) R21 violation — docs/SETUP.md was not updated; now carries a "Crack-wave toolchain — the four flow traps" table naming each trap, its measured cost and where it is caught. (b) family_sweep --only had no coverage assertion, so my 3-vs-50 mis-scope could recur silently; it now resolves member addrs to their family, ALWAYS prints --only: N addr(s) -> M family(ies) (... K unresolved), and REFUSES on zero (replaying the exact wave-Z call now prints 15 -> 3, 12 unresolved instead of quietly sweeping nothing). (c) pregate_check modelled the driver's typedef strip but never checked the consequence; it now reports [DROP-RISK] §203 USE-BEFORE-TYPEDEF — R39 bidirectional NC: flags the known-bad pre-hoist splice, 0 false positives on the post-hoist file and on all 7 other wave-Z TUs (its first draft read a typedef named in its own COMMENT as a use, so it searches a comment-blanked copy with offsets preserved). Memories: crack-wave-sweep-map-regen rewritten with the exemplar-vs-member keying, and a new silently-narrowed-tool-scope recording all four instances as one defect class.
  • Outstanding: func_8018675C (ov_SC02_005, closeness 6) — its agent ran ~35 variants and attributed the residual to cse.c:5278's unconditional constant-second swap for symbol-valued pointer bases (retires "reorder the addends" as a lever). Permuter fuel, not a hand lever.

🛑 SESSION CHECKPOINT — S59 (2026-08-24 ~12:50). Phase 31 CONTINUES. AGENTS RETURNED; EVERY FIX LANDED.

All three Fable agents completed and every claim was re-verified against the bytes by the main loop (each binary rebuilt under its own gate lock). 4 functions banked by the agents; the campaign banked 145 more (waves bk 110, bl 35) while they worked, undisturbed.

THE ANSWER TO "CAN THE WAVES DRAW AND BANK EACH TYPE NOW"

type	drawn by waves?	banks?	mechanism
default	yes	yes	unchanged
cc1	yes (new)	yes	never a structural blocker — it recorded a past compile failure
tells	yes, band 5-80	yes	+ the LEVER_CRIB on the card, the §172b grep aliases, 40 turns / $0.40
jtbl	yes (new) — 6/wave via --jtbl-quota	yes, gate-time carve	probe-filtered to reachable members, ONE per binary (§61c), main excluded
-O0, in an -O0 object	yes (50, incl. md_MAIN_011's 21)	yes	match_one auto-selects -O0; the Makefile is now the oracle, not the name
-O0, stranded in -O2	deliberately refused	no	unbankable by construction until U2/U3/U5 land — the draw says o0-in-an-O2-object

WHAT LANDED AFTER THE AGENTS RETURNED

• tells (commit:2667): LEVER_CRIB in api_agent._fuel (what each tell MEANS, the § to grep, the byte-proven C spellings) · a LANE ALIASES grep-bait block at §172b — the card named a word the 750-section cookbook contained zero times, and 108 failure transcripts grepped it for nothing · LANE_BUDGET = 40 turns / $0.40 for tells (98 of 270 attempts had ended AT the 24-turn cap on cards 2.4x the default size) · two new SYS laws (grep the crib's §; stop when the class says [permuter]) · cookbook §264 = the four recipes the agent drove to MATCH, including two NEW laws (save-order = a bb0 anti-dependence; an opaque bound must be a LATE-assigned local).
• -O0 (commit:2669): md_MAIN_011 now compiles -O0 — whole-object override, the boot precedent, no carve, no §18-P29 risk. Byte-proven by a CLEAN per-binary rebuild: sha1 80731bac0ddd6b3e354f43b2c179582b12590752. Landed with its coupling fix: three tools decided -O0-ness from the subseg NAME, and this object keeps its plain name, so corpus.o0_subseg() now derives it from the Makefile (R33). Verified end to end — match_one compiles those targets -O0 with the cannot-bank warning correctly gone, and the draw emits cards for them.
• jtbl (commit:2670): the lever alone was inert — jtbl cards are one-per-binary by construction, so they are maximally un-concentrated and the gate-group ranking (which exists to pack drafts behind one rebuild) selected 0 of 71 candidates. --jtbl-quota 6 seeds them before the ranked fill. Measured: 6 jtbl cards in a 200-card wave, 13,470 ins across 7 gate groups (was 11,451 in 1).
• §263 (commit:2666): the func_801F218C residual I could not close was an ARITY error, not a schedule — I had given a no-argument callee a parameter, so the copy had to dominate the call and the delay-slot filler took it. func_801EF6E4(a0) → func_801EF6E4() = MATCH (83 ins). The §5a fence (both placements), if/else inversion, an early-break form and a 1,200 s permuter at -j12 had all failed, because the permuter cannot change call arity.

RULE CANDIDATES FOR PHASEEND (P10 — Drew accepts, modifies or rejects)

• R44 — A CARD MAY NOT NAME A LEVER THE KNOWLEDGE BASE DOES NOT CONTAIN. Fuel a drafter cannot look up is a dead end that costs a grep and buys nothing; 108 transcripts proved it. Any label put on a card must resolve to a cookbook § by the words on the card itself.
• R45 — DRAW-TIME BANKABILITY: never draw a card the pipeline cannot bank. R43 for the wave draw. Measured: 11 -O0 functions drawn 79 times across 19 waves, none bankable; and jtbl members whose table the gate cannot reach. Each failure then looks ordinary and is attributed to the model.
• R46 — A BUDGET IS PART OF THE HARNESS, NOT A CONSTANT. One turn/cost cap across card sizes that differ 2.4x starves the large ones: 36% of tells failures ended at a cap, not at a wall.

STILL OPEN (ranked, from the agents' docs)

1. -O0 U2 — rollout_o0.py SC07 fix (~15 lines, 4 fns / 316 ins, zero drafting).
2. -O0 U3 — the ×3 jr_801380E0/jr_8013F350 carve+remap (54 fns / 6,414 ins, zero drafting; ov_SC01_077 already has all 16 exemplars matched). Draft-first ordering is what makes carves safe: stubs-in-new-object scored 1/4 and 2/2 historically; populated-at-carve is 137/137.
3. tells 6.3/6.5/6.6 — tell COUNTS on the card; the post-wave permuter + §173 recovery pass (16 permuter candidates and 34 shape-MATCH strays are waiting); route extend-tell ≥80 ins to idiom_serial (never once run on tells) instead of drafting the band wide.
4. jtbl — the 10 island-blocked members convert as the island stack peels; the 6 island-pads members need §8e pads wired for modules.mk.

---

🛑 SESSION CHECKPOINT — S59 LIVE (2026-08-24 ~11:45). Phase 31 CONTINUES. THREE FABLE AGENTS IN FLIGHT.

HEAD commit:2656 · autonomous lanes RUNNING (drafter · gater · maintenance · stallguard, ~130 agents) · src/+config/ carry live campaign work — COMMIT IT, NEVER REVERT (R42).

WHAT S59 DID — the S58 handoff's three tooling lanes, worked to a verdict each

LANE 4 (jtbl) — the §154-A island split is BYTE-PROVEN. md_SC03_076 / func_801F218C, exactly as the adversarial review prescribed: one inserted - [0x268, .rodata, md_SC03_076_jr_801F218C] plus jr_isolate_all.py --only. No _pre piece, no ld_interleave change, island piece untouched. Clean rebuild (build dirs deleted → re-extract → rebuild): sha1 9a165e36… BYTE-IDENTICAL, and the object-level control that a green SHA alone cannot give — md_SC03_076.o .rodata 0x27c→0x268, new jr object 0x14. Four md_*-blindness fixes made it possible:

• jtbl_carve.parse_config implements its documented contract at last (it took the FIRST data/.rodata piece; on the 42 md_* configs that is the leading island, so apply() DELETED the c line and corrupted the yaml on disk). tools/test_jtbl_parse_config.py: 171/171 non-md unchanged, 42/42 md_* now keep their c line. main was never in that corruption class — its defects were the config path (splat.us.exe.yaml), the file base (0x8000F800, not 0x80010000) and the asm tree (asm/nonmatchings/800/, not asm/main/). All three fixed; main now reaches the real analysis and refuses correctly (func_8001A114: subseg 800 would host non-contiguous carves).
• jr_isolate_all.rodata_carves no longer reads the leading island as a carve (it aborted UNOWNED 0x801ef468; discriminator verified over all 213 configs).
• Cookbook §260 carries the recipe + the island-is-a-stack census (only the END-adjacent table carves cheaply; each isolation exposes the next).
• Open: func_801F218C is ONE instruction from banking — gcc schedules addu $a0,$s0,$zero into a jal delay slot the target leaves as nop. §5a fence both sides, if/else inversion, early-break form and a 1200s permuter at -j12 all failed. Logged to the backlog (closeness 1, DELAY-SLOT) with the lever list, so the grinder keeps at it.

LANE 3 (o0/cc1) — answered with a census. 167 of 14,400 .s files carry the real -O0 prologue; the handoff's "311 $fp files" over-counts ($fp is $s8, allocatable at -O2). 51 sit in -O0 objects; 116 / 14,148 ins are stranded in -O2 subsegs and cannot bank at all — more than double the atlas estimate, with x2/x3/x4 sibling replication. The handoff's refutation of md_MAIN_003/011 is itself WRONG (16 and 21 -O0 functions, byte-verified) and is now marked so in the design doc. Two fixes landed: match_one derives the opt level from the target (prologue tell OR -O0 subseg) — --o0 existed and NOTHING ever passed it, so every agent handed an -O0 target saw an -O2 compile of its own C, a mismatch on every instruction and no way to converge; and build_wave_atlas now refuses to DRAW a stranded -O0 function (measured: 11 of them drawn 79 times across 19 waves, ~6 per wave, under head-crack/UNKNOWN/tells/len-vein/redraft labels, none of which could ever bank — a live draw now reports o0-in-an-O2-object: 54). cc1 joined the default lever list: it records a past compile failure, not a structural blocker. Cookbook §261.

LANE 1 (tells) — the removal measured the population, not the lever. All four waves S58 cited ran at band 120-2000. Bank rate by size, from each wave's cards joined to the functions its own commit banked: 0-50 default 57% / tells 40% · 50-80 30%/27% · 80-120 22%/10% · 120-200 3%/1% · 200+ 6%/0%. Tells cards are median 89-95 ins vs default's 37-39 (2.4x). Tells is restored and pinned to band 5-80; the large band always goes to default. §235 (phantom symbol) is REFUTED as the tells cause — among MISMATCH? rows the shape-already-matched fraction is 6/66, 4/81, 5/47 on tells vs 25/87, 16/79, 17/66, 13/57 on default: tells drafts fail on the BODY. Wave bi confirmed the band diagnosis live: tells @120-2000, 0 banked of 50 drafts. Cookbook §262.

IN FLIGHT — THREE FABLE AGENTS (launched ~11:45; results NOT yet on disk)

agent	asked for	deliverable
tells	residual taxonomy from the drafts on disk, the idioms drafters lack, card/prompt changes, honest 75% verdict	docs/tool-designs/tells-lane-s59.md (proposes diffs only)
o0	per-sub-population bankability, whether we can write -O0-matching C at all (byte-proven crack), serial-vs-wave, worth-it verdict	docs/tool-designs/o0-path-s59.md (proposes diffs only)
jtbl	AUTOMATE carve→draft→bank, prove on two targets, name the campaign hook	docs/tool-designs/jtbl-automation-s59.md + implementation + commits

If this session died before they returned: their docs may or may not exist — check docs/tool-designs/*-s59.md and git log. Re-spawning is cheap; the briefs are in the S59 transcript and every fact they were given is in this checkpoint.

OPS LAW LEARNED (docs/accelerators.md #5)

A running lane script does not read your edit. bash parses while … done in full before executing, so a lane-ARG change is invisible to the running shell and a python bounce re-runs the OLD command line (measured: an 18-minute-old edit was invisible until the shell restarted). Code changes (tools/*.py) → a bounce suffices. Arg changes (.sh) → fresh shell, via tools/lanes/relaunch_drafter_shell.sh, which waits for a wave to queue so no drafts are lost. Wave-draw defaults (build_wave_atlas.py) → next draw, no restart at all.

STANDING VERIFICATION

md_SC03_076 re-verified byte-identical from a CLEAN per-binary rebuild (R22 scoped to the binary I touched — a fleet make clean is unsafe while gates are building). No fleet R22 run this session; the campaign's own gates carry it.

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🛑 CRASH-RECOVERY CHECKPOINT — S58 LIVE (2026-08-24 00:2x). Phase 31 CONTINUES. WORK IS IN FLIGHT.

This is NOT a fresh-session handoff — it is a crash-recovery snapshot. Autonomous lanes are RUNNING right now. If you are reading this after a crash, the first question is not "what next" but "what is still alive" — see RESTART below.

HEAD commit:2600 · 1,790 functions banked today across 36 commits · 7,581 open overlay/md/resident stubs · tree clean · R22 last verified GREEN 213/213 at commit:2587 (re-verify before trusting).

WHAT IS RUNNING (all setsid-detached, all self-restarting)

lane	script	role
drafter	.run/drafter.sh	draw → shard → draft → queue a ready marker, forever. NEVER stop this to ship a code change (that cost 139 of 162 idle minutes on 2026-08-23)
gater	.run/gater.sh	reloc pre-filter → gate → commit → harvest → ledger. Safe to kill/restart
maintenance	.run/maintenance.sh	the FREE A-prop sibling lane whenever the gater is idle; zero model tokens
stallguard	.run/stallguard.sh	60s cycle: revive a dead lane shell, kill agents silent >20min, kill a gate >90min, bounce an idle drafter
toolwork	.run/toolwork.sh	2 ox agents designing the jtbl island-split and the o0/cc1 lanes (read-only)

Stop everything cleanly: touch .run/ox_campaign.stop. A 5-minute cron (271eadf8) checks the lanes.

RESTART AFTER A CRASH, IN THIS ORDER

1. git status --porcelain -- src/ config/ — if dirty, COMMIT it, never revert (R42). A dirty src/ after a crash is usually banked work a gate had not committed yet. The one safe revert is src/800.c/src/800c.c alone when a gate_main was interrupted mid-substitution.
2. Salvage drafts: find .run/wave_* -name '*.c' | wc -l — drafts survive crashes and are worth re-gating via ox_campaign.py --gate-only <tag> before drafting anything new.
3. Relaunch: setsid nohup .run/drafter.sh >> .run/drafter.log 2>&1 </dev/null & then the same for gater.sh, maintenance.sh, stallguard.sh. Verify from the STARTUP BANNER, not the config file (a # between backslash-continued args silently drops them all — see docs/accelerators.md).
4. Drafting is the clock-limited resource (ox is free for ~3 more days) — start it FIRST, do bookkeeping while it runs.

FLEET / SCALING, AS MEASURED

• 1,720 ox + 280 deepseek, 3,000-card waves. Shard count tracks CARDS, not the config: a 818-card wave runs 818 shards however many are configured. Card supply is the binding constraint.
• ox 429s are launch burst only — 961 of 964 landed in the first 5-minute bucket when 818 shards fired at once; every later bucket 0.0%. Startup is now staggered. Not a capacity ceiling.
• Agent RSS ~10 MB steady (the 39 MB figure was a startup snapshot). WSL raised 32→48 GB via /mnt/c/Users/user/.wslconfig; 45 GB available carries thousands, not hundreds.
• deepseek's pool has never returned a 429. Zero PLATFORM 429s ever — OpenRouter has not once refused this account. Credit ~$16.
• Telemetry: every request and 429 appends to .run/api_rate.jsonl; read with tools/api_rate.py.

TOOLS BUILT THIS SESSION

tools/ox_campaign.py (drafter/gater split, lane+band rotation, pipelining, main parking, smallest-ratio model lanes, launch stagger, per-wave harvest) · tools/idiom_harvest.py · tools/api_rate.py · tools/idiom_serial.py (serial compounding lane, ov_* jtbl only) · .run/{drafter,gater,maintenance,stallguard,toolwork,sibling_lane}.sh

FIXES THAT MUST NOT REGRESS

• atlas.py _CONF_RANK needs aprop-pure — without it atlas.py cannot run AT ALL, and the remap lever (235 groups / 46,240 ins) is invisible.
• validate_targets prefers the card's own addr — name-slicing made every NAMED symbol MALFORMED and discarded whole 220-card waves.
• sweep_parallel REFUSES main (R43). gate_main holds .run/auto/gate.main.lock (R42 companion).
• api_agent: 5xx retried like 429; HTTP_TIMEOUT 420s not 1800; EXTRA_READABLE widens the read surface for tooling briefs; bare-directory paths no longer refused.
• ox_campaign.gate() COMMITS a dirty tree, never reverts (R42).

THE WORK QUEUE (ordered, and why)

1. jtbl/o0/cc1 tooling — the two ox study agents return DESIGNS; a Fable agent validates each design before implementation; then WE write the tool and verify on 2 examples per tool before it joins the toolset; then cards that exercise it, end-to-end, before autonomy resumes. Population: jtbl 177 groups / 36,685 ins (169 of 245 members are ov_*, where the carve works; 150 of 177 groups are SINGLETONS so there is little family leverage) · o0 6,564 ins · cc1 6,511.
2. main — 157 drafts parked in .run/main_queue/, ~1,041 open stubs. Its gate is a clean whole-EXE rebuild that bisects on failure: 39 min unfinished on 29 drafts, 25 min on 8, 65+ min on 8. Needs a cheaper gate, not more agents. ~54 h of gate time at current rates = the schedule risk.
3. The tells lane — 86,602 ins, never drawn until now (a rotation counter reset to 0 on every restart, so index 1 was never reached). Draws at rotation index 16.
4. Sibling remap — use aprop_autodraft (synthesizes a minimal preamble), NOT family_sweep --hseq (carries the seed's decl layer: 0/14 banked on a PURE probe, all PLUMBING). 527 templatable families / 1,334 members is the tool-verified number; the 5,042 card-file count was optimistic.

HONEST FRONTIER (atlas, before today's ~1,790 banks)

SOLVED lanes 8,607 inst / 352,649 ins · TELLS 1,132 / 86,602 · NEEDS TOOLING 452 / 53,853 · other 287 / 6,130. Clean-run pace ~400 banked/hour; today's actual was 1,790 in ~24 h at 53% idle.

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🛑 S58 HANDOFF — THE THREE OPEN TOOLING LANES (jtbl · o0/cc1 · tells)

Written 2026-08-24 with full session context. Each lane below has a STUDY on disk, a VERDICT, and a named next action. Read the linked doc before touching the tool — both studies contain claims that were checked and refuted, and re-deriving them costs hours.

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LANE 4 — jtbl island split · docs/tool-designs/jtbl-island-split{,-review}.md

Population (atlas): 177 groups / 245 instances / 36,685 ins. By binary class: ov 169 · main 47 · md 24 · resident 5. 150 of 177 groups are SINGLETONS — only 26 multi-member non-md groups exist (6,294 ins), so there is very little family leverage to amortise the tooling. Judge the investment against that, not against 36,685.

Verdict: GO-WITH-CHANGES. Fable's adversarial review = 14 CONFIRMED / 8 WRONG / 1 UNVERIFIABLE. The correct implementation is SMALLER than the ox design proposed:

• DO NOT create a _pre piece. A dotted .rodata named md_SC03_076_pre has no sibling .c, so splat points the ld at a never-built "implied C file" object; the rename also unbinds the island from md_SC03_076.c, breaking the other five stub tables' migration and both INCLUDE_RODATA blobs.
• DO NOT touch ld_interleave. Verified against the real generated build/md_SC03_076/md_SC03_076.ld + splat's LinkerWriter: the native script is already rodata-first in yaml order. No leading mode, no make variable.
• KEEP - [0x0, .rodata, md_SC03_076] untouched. The whole "split" is ONE INSERTED LINE: - [0x268, .rodata, md_SC03_076_jr_801F218C].
• Isolate with jr_isolate_all.py --only, NOT jr_isolate.py. The latter's backend (split_src_region.py:109-111) provably sys.exits on md_SC03_076.c's top-level extern block. jtbl_family_bank.py:183 already uses the right one.

BEFORE any of that — harden parse_config. On md_/main it does not implement its own documented contract and can DELETE the c config line, corrupting the yaml on disk before it errors out. tools/jtbl_carve.py::cfg_path now HARD-REFUSES md_/main for this reason (S58); lift that refusal only once parse_config is fixed and proven on two examples.

main additionally needs: a file-base of 0x8000F800 (not the yaml's 0x80010000 — payload_word silently reads 0x800 early), and there is no config/splat.main.yaml at all (it is splat.us.exe.yaml), which was the original FileNotFoundError.

Known real defects in the existing tools (from the study, worth fixing while in there): the migrated_tables "same address by construction" premise is refuted by apply()'s own measurement; the hardcoded 0x80100000–0x801D0000 vram window is vacuous for md_* text at 0x801EF468+ AND for main, and for md the clamp's safety guard inverts into silent entry-dropping; the --order docstring overstates what that branch does.

NEGATIVE CONTROL — do not trust the one in the ox study. It cites func_801F218C @ md_SC03_076 going 43,760 → 43,760 vs a diseased 43,768 (+8, first diff 0x144). Fable found that +8/0x144 baseline was measured on func_801F0F28 and misattributed. Build a fresh control. The object-level .rodata sh_size 0x14 discriminator is sound; the whole-binary SHA gate is the arbiter.

Also missed by the design: a per-target migration-re-homing precheck (func_801F218C is safe by census), and the pre-object contiguity wall — only island-end-adjacent tables carve cheaply; func_801F0F28 itself needs cascading isolation. Pipeline integration goes through jtbl_family_bank.

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LANE 3 — the -O0 and cc1 lanes · docs/tool-designs/o0-cc1-lanes.md

Populations (atlas): o0-lane 31 groups / 69 instances / 6,564 ins · cc1 14 groups / 105 instances / 6,511 ins. Small. A defensible outcome is "not worth building" — say so with evidence rather than building a lane that cannot bank.

Status: the study is HALF REFUTED and the header of that doc records which half.

claim	verdict
func_801F0A9C @ md_SC03_076 has no frame pointer, so the atlas o0-lane tag is WRONG for it	CONFIRMED — zero $fp under asm/md_SC03_076/
md_MAIN_003 (~16 fns) and md_MAIN_011 (~20 fns) are the un-routed -O0 population	WRONG — zero $fp in either module

$fp occurs in 311 files across asm/ — that is the population an -O0 lane would really target, and nobody has looked at it. Start there.

Detection law (byte-proven, cookbook §6/§18): gcc-2.7.2 at -O0 keeps a frame pointer; addu $fp,$sp,$zero = bytes 21F0A003. -O2 omits it.

Already-routed -O0 machinery — do not rebuild it: boot is handled at Makefile:697 (build/src/boot.o: CC1FLAGS := …-O0); overlay clusters are covered by the Makefile globs WHALE_O0B_OBJS (src/ov_*/ov_*_o0?.c) and O0_CLUSTER_OBJS (*_o0.c); tools/rollout_o0.py and tools/o0_subsplit.py exist.

THE LOAD-BEARING QUESTION FOR BOTH, STILL UNANSWERED: can the existing gate path bank these functions unchanged? A lane that drafts functions the gate cannot accept produces verified drafts that never bank — that trap has already cost this project two sessions (S57's jtbl pair; wave ab's 105 main cards banking 0/105). Answer this BEFORE drafting a single card.

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LANE 1 (half done) — tells: REMOVED from drafting, destination UNKNOWN

extend-tell / swaprepeat-tell / s16-div-tell = 1,040 member functions / 86,602 ins. Removed from the drafting rotation in tools/lanes/drafter.sh on measured evidence — four waves: as 5/9 gated of 57 drafts · aw 6/12 of 60 · az 4/10 of 55 · bd 3/9 of 56, because ~80% of tells drafts name symbols the target .s never references (vs the default lane's 74-84% clean).

DO NOT assume aprop_autodraft is the answer. I asserted that three times from the failure signature alone; checked, its input population overlaps the 1,040 tells members by 44 (4.2%).

The one live hypothesis, untested: cookbook §235 (the phantom symbol) — match_one masks relocations, so a draft naming a nonexistent symbol scores a clean MATCH with no instruction diff at all; the cure is the extern u16 SYM[]; SYM[1] spelling for %hi(SYM+K). That is exactly the tells failure signature. Cheap test: draw one tells wave with §235 in the brief and compare the MISMATCH? rate against the 80% baseline before writing the lane off.

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RULES ADDED IN S58 — ACCEPTED BY DREW 2026-08-23, BINDING FROM NOW

Rule	Reason
R42 — COMMIT BANKED WORK THE MOMENT IT EXISTS; NEVER BLIND-REVERT A DIRTY src/. A gate that banks with commit=False (sweep_parallel, gate_stage --no-propagate) leaves REAL, byte-proven functions uncommitted in the tree, and no tool can distinguish them from residue. Two obligations follow. (a) A lane that banks commits before handing control to any other lane, tool, or step — not at the end of the wave, not "after main", immediately. (b) A tool that finds a dirty tree COMMITS it or REFUSES; git checkout -- src/ config/ as a tidy-up is forbidden. The byte-gate is the arbiter of whether work is correct; git is the only thing that makes it durable, and the window between the two is where work dies.	Three instances in one session, one of which fired. ox_campaign.gate() and idiom_serial both opened with git checkout -- src/ config/ to clear "residue" — caught before they ran. gate_main.py then did it for real: it substitutes into src/ and reverts on a failing batch, could not tell its own substitution from the 61 overlay functions sweep_parallel had just banked with commit=False, and reverted all 61 back to INCLUDE_ASM stubs (verified against corpus.stubs) after 95 minutes of bisecting. The drafts survived in .run/, the gate cycle did not.
R43 — A TOOL MUST REFUSE AN INPUT IT CANNOT HANDLE, NEVER PROCESS IT WRONGLY. Silently accepting work a tool will mishandle is worse than skipping it, because the output is a plausible FAILURE that gets attributed to the subject instead of the harness. Where a tool has a known-unsupported input class, it fails loud and names the tool that does handle it.	sweep_parallel contained an explicit "us.exe" if b == "main" branch — written to LET main IN — while gate_main.py's own docstring documents that main cannot be gated incrementally (its extract rewrites the linker script). Measured: wave ab drew 105 main cards and banked 0 of 105, while its 115 non-main cards banked 94 (82%). The drafts were competent; the harness could not accept them, and the wave read as a drafting failure for a whole session. Extends R32 (assert your coverage) from silently skipping work to silently accepting work it will mishandle, and is the same family as R40 (exonerate the instrument).

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🛑 SESSION CHECKPOINT — S57 FINAL (2026-08-19/23). Phase 31 CONTINUES. NOTHING IN FLIGHT.

HEAD commit:2565 · R22 make check-all 213/213 from a clean tree still VALID (no src/ change since S56; this session banked NOTHING) · EXE 143dbb89 · 0 NON_MATCHING · fleet unchanged at 96.1 / 91.8 / 97.11. No process running, no wave launched, no cron armed.

WHAT THIS SESSION WAS

An external-model bake-off, not a banking session. Drew's goal: replace ultracode wave agents with cheap/free API models to stop burning weekly Claude usage. Answer: yes, decisively — but NOTHING WAS BANKED, and that is the top of the next session's list.

THE FOUR RESULTS THAT MATTER

1. CARD FUEL IS THE BIGGEST LEVER — bigger than model choice. Injecting the wave card's seed_ref/tu_ref/decl_prior into an API model took the SAME 10 cards from 4/10 to 9/10 (DeepSeek) and 4/5 (ox). func_80181E70 (122 ins) went from no compiling draft to MATCH in 2 oracle calls. The "60-instruction ceiling" I inferred earlier was an artifact of withholding fuel, not a capability limit. Always --cards before drafting; it is free and deterministic.
2. Sub-50 is nearly free money: 19/19 verified MATCH at $0.007/function, blind (no fuel). The pool is 7,724 sub-50 open functions = 73.5% of all open, in 2,710 groups (1,457 multi-member holding 6,471; 5,014 are siblings). All 2,710 exemplars ≈ $19; every sub-50 directly ≈ $54.
3. A free model cracked a 611-ins function AND wrote a publishable idiom. All four autopsy arms (Opus/Sonnet/ox/DeepSeek) matched func_801898E4 + 3 siblings = 2,444 instructions, every one reloc_identity AGREE at 80 relocs. ox also cracked the jtbl exemplar (83 ins) and distilled §206 — whose two negative results I independently byte-confirmed (51 and 66 mismatches).
4. §206 transfers WITHIN a family, NOT across. exemplar 40 turns/5 oracle -> within-family 11 turns/3 oracle MATCH -> cross-family 56 turns/0 compiles, FAILED. So jtbl costs ~40 turns of learning per family (191 families), not per class. The jtbl quest is a project, not a lane — defer it.

⚠ THE BIG UNBANKED PILE (do this FIRST next session)

Everything below is reloc_identity-verified and sitting in .run/bakeoff/, banked nowhere:

work	ins	where	note
611 family ×4	2,444	.run/bakeoff/ap-opus/, ap-sonnet/, ap-ds/, ap-ox/	TWO independent drafts each; both blocking tool bugs FIXED
sub-50 probe	19 fns	.run/bakeoff/sub50A/, sub50B/	19/19 verified
fueled batch-10	~9 fns	.run/bakeoff/ds-fuelA/, ds-fuelB/, ox-fuelA/	vs 4/10 blind
jtbl exemplar + sibling	170	.run/bakeoff/jtbl-ox2/, jtbl-xfer/	needs the §8a CARVE first — a verified match_one is NOT bankable until the table is carved
Matching is solved; integration is the bottleneck — this session proved the first half four times
over and never touched the second.

TOOL FIXES SHIPPED (all negative-controlled)

• family_remap.gather_externs — scanned every .c in the source overlay and took the FIRST alphabetical match, so it carried D_8011514C/D_8011515C type-swapped (sh/lh vs lbu/sb, LENGTH-DRIFT 610 vs 611 at insn 448). Now prefers the extracted unit's own file. NC: reproduces the correct u8/s16 pair.
• atlas.py::member_lever — aprop_card was loaded and never read while a bare DIFF token promoted members to needs-autopsy. PURE now outranks the ledger; provenance recorded in the confidence string. Rescues 32 members / 11 families / 3,810 ins.
• decl_prior._ASM_SYM — \b bound to the whole alternation, so the %hi/%lo arm had NEVER fired (0 of 1,210 across four waves). NC: jal 306->306 zero regressions, data 0->299.
• api_agent.py (NEW, untracked) — the API-model harness. Gained this session: --cards (fuel), --brief (analysis tasks), --max-cost/--max-cost-per-fn (OpenRouter Agent-SDK style), nudge loop, 429 backoff with PLATFORM-vs-PROVIDER attribution + Retry-After, transport retry, directory reads, non-fatal tool faults, error-body surfacing, and a repeated-call guard (identical call x4 breaks the loop — ox burned 56 turns on 46 identical greps with 0 compiles).
• api_draft.py — FRESH_RETRY, reasoning controls, unterminated-fence extraction.

MODEL LEDGER (OpenRouter, ~$21 spent of $26.83; all costs MEASURED)

model	verdict
stealth/ox-alpha	$0.00, cracked 611 + jtbl + wrote §206; 4/5 fueled. BURSTY — upstream_provider_shared_pool 429s; NOT a :free variant so no 20/min-1000/day cap. Rumoured 5-day window.
deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731	$0.46 total; the DEPENDABLE lane. effort=high. 9/10 fueled
z-ai/glm-5.3	$6.31 — 3/4 rungs but $1.10 on ONE failure. effort=max REGRESSED it (0 compiles on a card it had matched); wants REASON_CAP=16000
RETIRED	Kimi K3 ($2.71, surrendered), Qwen 3.8 Max ($5.98) + 2.4t ($3.20) — read exhaustively, compile rarely
free tier	glm-5.2:free unreachable (Decart shared pool, 11h+); laguna/dots never compiled; nemotron-ultra works at effort (NOT reasoning.max_tokens — that 502s)
REQUESTS PER FUNCTION = 12-25 (each turn is one POST). :free caps = 20/min, 1000/day -> only
40-80 functions/day. ox escapes that cap but not its provider's pool.

RECOMMENDED NEXT SESSION, IN ORDER

1. BANK THE 2,444 (611 family ×4) — highest value, drafts verified twice, blockers fixed.
2. Bank the sub-50 19 + the fueled batch-10.
3. Then the sub-50 wave with --cards (~$19 for all 2,710 exemplars; gate by TU density — the top-40 TUs hold 52% of the pool in 40 rebuilds).
4. Worktrees are the untested accelerator: gate_lane refuses to run concurrently, so parallel drafting queues behind one serial gate. Worktrees would fix it.
5. DEFER: the 245-member jtbl quest (per-family learning cost), more model comparisons.

RULES ADDED THIS SESSION — ACCEPTED BY DREW 2026-08-23, BINDING FROM NOW

Rule	Reason
R40 (ACCEPTED) — EXONERATE THE INSTRUMENT BEFORE YOU ATTRIBUTE A FAILURE TO ITS SUBJECT. When a measured subject (a model, a binary, a family, a lane) appears to fail, the harness that produced the reading is a suspect until cleared. Before writing "X failed", check the run for: a truncated reply (finish=length), a transport error, a rate limit, an unhandled tool fault, a parameter the provider rejected, a missing input the subject was entitled to, and a loop the harness never bounded. Report the failure only once those are excluded — and when one of them WAS the cause, say so as a correction, not as a footnote.	Seven instances in one session, every one reported to Drew as a model result first: a 568k-token prompt read as "GLM returns empty"; an unstripped code fence read as "Qwen writes broken C"; uncapped reasoning read as three separate models "failing"; break-on-finish=length read as "DeepSeek gave up with 24 turns unspent"; a reasoning.max_tokens that 502s one provider read as "nemotron-ultra can't run"; an IncompleteRead read as "near 17 is its ceiling"; a directory read that killed the jtbl run at turn 2 of 50. The models were fine; the instrument was not. Extends R35 (fix the instrument before trusting the measurement) to the ATTRIBUTION step, which R35 does not cover.
R41 (ACCEPTED) — A COST, RATE OR YIELD NUMBER SHIPS WITH ITS DENOMINATOR. Never quote a marginal figure where a total is implied, or a success rate without the attempts it excludes. Say which one it is in the same sentence: "$0.09 per solved function, $6.31 spent total", "19/19 on a seeded stratified sample of 19", "12–25 requests per function, so 1,000/day = 40–80 functions".	I reported GLM-5.3 as costing $0.30 for eight messages. Drew's bill said $5. Both were true: $0.30 was the marginal cost of the two runs that matched, $6.31 was the spend, and 95% of the difference was experiments and my own configuration failures. The flattering number was the one I kept repeating. This is the session's own dominant defect class — a true number about a narrower scope than the reader believes (memory silently-narrowed-tool-scope) — turned on my own reporting, and it extends P9 (milestone honesty) from outcomes to metrics.

Not elevated to rules (Phase-8+ precedent — techniques to the cookbook, findings to the checkpoint): the card-fuel result (§206 + the fuel A/B) is a procedure already enforced by --cards; the jtbl idiom is §206; the gather_externs / atlas / decl_prior defects are R32/R33/R36 cases the existing rules already govern; "a verified match_one is not a bankable jtbl card" is a watch-for below.

WATCH-FORS

• A verified match_one is NOT a bankable card for jtbl functions — the §8a carve (jtbl_carve -> make extract) must happen first; api_agent cannot do it (read-only, no config).
• reloc_identity's summary line prints shape=MATCH even when it means "streams not aligned, verdict advisory" — read the line BELOW it.
• Don't run card tooling during a gate (corpus.stubs() misreports substituted drafts).
• .env holds the OpenRouter key as open_router_key= (no export, no prefix).

🛑 (superseded by S57) SESSION CHECKPOINT — S56 FINAL (2026-08-18). Phase 31 CONTINUES. NOTHING IN FLIGHT.

HEAD commit:2563 · tree clean except Ghidra db.*.gbf restart-noise (R23: do NOT stage) and .run/ scratch · R22 make check-all = 213 passed / 0 failed of 213 from a CLEAN tree · EXE 143dbb89 · 0 NON_MATCHING in any default build (G4) · dedup-check 2,165 validated / 0 failed · C1 254,731/254,731. No process running, no cron armed, no workflow in flight. Drew pushes.

Banked this session: 127 functions

lane	banked	notes
wave Z drafts, first gate	72 of 73	74/75 drafted MATCH, 0 immovable, 73 reconciled onto slates
recovery — func_800CC310	1	§203 address-order typedef hoist; 0 agent tokens
recovery — func_8018280C	1	§202 alias on a DEFINITION (the §183.3 DEF-side wall); 0 agent tokens
mechanical siblings — first sweep	3	mis-scoped, see below
mechanical siblings — corrected sweep	50	22 families, --band all, ~0 tokens

Fleet 96.1% instr-weighted · 91.8% distinct-code · 97.11% fn-count · MAIN 20.5%. (Session start: 96.0 / 91.7 / 97.07.) 10,501 stubs open.

THE ONE-LINE VERSION OF WHAT THIS SESSION LEARNED

Four tools were silently answering a narrower question than they were asked, and every one exited zero reporting a TRUE number. wave_snapshot found 9 of 75 targets (and took the S46 validity gate off the path with it for six waves) · family_sweep --only selected 2 families instead of 21 (3 banked vs 50, same tree, same day) · decl_prior's %hi/%lo arm had never fired in 1,210 opportunities across four waves · pregate_check modelled the banking driver faithfully and never checked the consequence, so it said "clean" about the batch it broke. The byte-gate cannot see any of this — it is a perfect CORRECTNESS oracle and a null COVERAGE oracle (R34). When a step reports a count, ask what denominator it is a fraction of, and make the tool print it.

RESULTS THAT OUTLIVE THE COUNT

1. §202 — THE ALIAS CARRIES A DEFINITION. s32 aF8018280C(s32) __asm__("func_8018280C"); banks a DEF-side return-type wall with the TU's three void decls left untouched. §183.3's "report IMMOVABLE with a TU edit" is no longer the end of that road. In-tree the idiom existed only on declarations. Reach for it the moment a wall is DEF-side.
2. §203 — A DEDUPED TYPEDEF MUST PRECEDE EVERY SPLICE POINT. Two slate-mates sharing a type: strip_provided_typedefs drops the earlier-addressed one's copy and the survivor lands below its uses (parse error before '<symbol>', which reads like a codegen residual). Hoist to the top of the TU; never rename in one draft — that gives one symbol two types and the failure just moves. pregate_check now reports [DROP-RISK] §203 USE-BEFORE-TYPEDEF before the gate cycle.
3. R38 PAID FOR ITSELF, AFTER I IGNORED IT. The verdict was on disk in .run/harvest_failed.<binary>.classified.txt before I ran a single oracle. I ran reloc_identity (AGREE, correct, irrelevant) and then a disassembly that read 69/69 identical — an artifact, because the draft never compiled and the .elf still held the original INCLUDE_ASM bytes. A byte-diff against a build that failed to include your draft always reads MATCH.
4. THE HARVEST'S ADVERSARIAL VERIFIER KILLED 7 OF 12 LAW CLAIMS — two by reproducing the claimed mechanism and finding it BYTE-FALSE, five as re-derivations of existing §§. The synthesizer then corrected three wrong line citations and re-measured a law's claimed +4 instruction cost as an actual +1. 82 reports -> 30 already-covered, 31 confirmations, 5 laws, 16 rejected (§204).
5. A BACKLOG DRAFT PATH IS NOT A STABLE ORIGINAL. gate_stage calls backlog.save_draft() on failure, so a failed attempt OVERWRITES it; "copying the original back" copied my rename. The bytes banked correctly, but §203's first write-up claimed "draft byte-unchanged" and was wrong — corrected in place. Snapshot text you intend to re-gate. A symbol-rewriting transform also mangled prose INSIDE A COMMENT ((*(Quad4_800CCAD0 *)&D_800CCB14)) — transforms must skip comments (H5).

Tooling shipped (all negative-controlled, both directions)

build_wave_atlas: the S46 validity gate now runs where cards are BORN (--allow-invalid escape) — NC: wave AA 69/69 OK pre-draft, poisoned card refused OUT-OF-RANGE · validate_targets: accepts the card spelling fn; PRE-DRAFT-ONLY constraint documented in the tool (every verdict reads live sig/stub/.s state, so the same check after a wave condemns exactly the targets that BANKED — an R39 refusal-check at the wrong moment) · wave_snapshot: honors the card's sub (NC 9/9 legacy byte-identical, 66/66 split-TU recovered; wave AA snapshotted 69/69 by the call that found 9 of 75 this morning) · family_sweep --only: resolves MEMBER addrs to their family, always prints --only: N addr(s) -> M family(ies) (... K unresolved), refuses on zero · pregate_check: [DROP-RISK] §203 USE-BEFORE-TYPEDEF (searches a comment-blanked copy — its first draft read a typedef named in its own comment as a use) · decl_prior: §204-E — the leading \b bound to the whole alternation, demanding a word boundary before %, impossible in a .s (NC: jal 306→306 zero regressions, data 0→299); uncopyable pointer-to-function spellings are now MARKED fleet_note, not dropped. Docs: SETUP.md "Crack-wave toolchain — the four flow traps"; memories crack-wave-sweep-map-regen (rewritten) + new silently-narrowed-tool-scope.

WAVE AA IS BUILT AND STAGED — DELIBERATELY NOT LAUNCHED (Drew's instruction)

69 cards / 6,539 ins / 8 GATE GROUPS (8.6 drafts per rebuild) · models opus 19 / sonnet 50 · seed_ref 34 · tu_ref 46 · decl_prior rows 471, of which 165 are DATA rows — 0 on every prior wave (the §204-E fix; 49 marked fleet_note as uncopyable fn-pointer spellings) · 33 siblings behind 25 gids staged · nins 60-197 (avg 95) · levers UNKNOWN 36 / head-crack 12 / family-sweep 10 / redraft 6 / seeded-crack 3 / len-vein 1 / integration 1. Binaries: ov_SC07_000 14 · ov_SC01_080 13 · ov_SC07_006 9 · ov_SC02_021 9 · ov_SC04_004 8 · ov_SC06_032 7 · ov_SC02_000 5 · ov_SC02_016 4. All 69 passed the validity gate pre-draft. To fire it:

Workflow({scriptPath: ".run/wave_p31aa_workflow.js", args: <the object in .run/wave_aa_args.json>})

Cards .run/wave_aa_cards.json · siblings .run/wave_aa_cards.siblings.json · wavedir .run/wave_p31aa · snapshot .run/waveAA_asm_snapshot/ (69/69 + MANIFEST.sha1). Gate-group count is 8, same as wave Z — the recipe's re-open-the-band trigger is ~12, not yet hit.

THE WAVE-CLOSING SEQUENCE (memory wave-harvest-is-a-pipeline-step)

snapshot+verify+gate -> RECOVER the failures (near-miss / gate-drop / errored; read .run/harvest_failed.<bin>.classified.txt FIRST) -> gate the recovery -> regen (make sig-overlays + family_hseq.py) -> family_sweep --hseq --band all with families selected by MEMBERSHIP, not by handing it your banked addrs -> R22 once -> harvest+bank idioms (run gap_triage first) -> build the next wave's cards -> CHECKPOINT, always, refreshed if any work lands after it.

Known-open items

• func_8018675C (ov_SC02_005, closeness 6) — ~35 variants ground; residual attributed to cse.c:5278's unconditional constant-second swap for symbol-valued pointer bases, which retires "reorder the addends" as a lever. Permuter fuel, not a hand lever.
• func_80184F18 (wave V, closeness 9) · func_80184500 (wave W, 4) · func_8017F9D8 (wave X, 1).
• func_80031A98 — the D_800C5328 wall. The 6 §188 SDK objects -> psyq_integrate. GsSortBg/GsSortFastBg fragment merges. gfx2D_BG0_OBJ_4D8 (§181 mirror class).
• Two wave-W cards still released to the pool: func_80185480, func_8017EC98.
• gate_main.typesig renders pointer-to-function unusably (('void (*', ('* void',))). NOT fixed: typesig/norm_sig is the BANKING DRIVER's conflict oracle (sig_conflict), so changing its output changes signature equality classes fleet-wide. The safe fix is a DISPLAY-only pretty-printer in decl_prior — no index rebuild needed, the tuple is what's stored. Rows are marked meanwhile so no agent pastes one.
• The typing/naming debt remains the largest non-matching liability (S54 note): 9.5 casts per 100 lines, 749 per-function invented typedefs vs 220 shared. Byte-checkable by the same gate.

Watch-fors

• Transient API failures are normal at this scale: resume with Workflow({scriptPath, resumeFromRunId, args}) — cached agents replay, only dead ones re-run. Never rebuild a wave by hand.
• A wave script's LAWS block is a JS template literal: backticks inside law text terminate it.
• gate_lane aborts on a dirty src//config/; it commits per function, so do not run your own git commit while it runs (index.lock race).
• Do NOT run card tooling (build_wave*, validate_targets) DURING a gate — corpus.stubs() misreports substituted drafts and every verdict reads ALREADY-DONE.
• md_ MODULE binaries gate through gate_lane like overlays. Only main (the EXE) needs gate_main --apply* — its extract rewrites the .ld and an incremental build gives a false diff.
• pregate_check models two drivers (main -> gate_main hoist/strip, overlay/module -> harvest_verify.strip_provided_typedefs). A third driver would need teaching.

🛑 (superseded by S56) SESSION CHECKPOINT — S54/S55 FINAL (2026-08-17/18). Phase 31 CONTINUES. NOTHING IN FLIGHT.

HEAD commit:2546 · tree clean except .run/backlog.jsonl churn + Ghidra db.*.gbf restart-noise (R23: do NOT stage) · R22 make check-all = 213 passed / 0 failed of 213 from a CLEAN tree, run SEVEN times this session (after every wave and after wave Y's recovery) · EXE 143dbb89 · 0 NON_MATCHING. No process running, no cron armed, no workflow in flight. Drew pushes.

Banked this session: 547 functions

lane	banked	notes
wave T — 5 groups	70 of 70	zero drops — first wave ever to bank every byte-verified draft
wave U — 7 groups	73 of 73	100% drafted AND banked; 15% fewer tokens, 64% of the wall-clock
wave V — 9 groups	68 of 69
wave W — 3 groups, UNKNOWN lane	68 of 70	24.3 drafts/rebuild; first MODULE binary
wave X — 4 groups	62 of 63	second module binary clean
wave Y — 5 groups	72	64 gate + 4 recovery (§200, 0 agent tokens) + 4 siblings
mechanical siblings (all waves)	113	family_sweep --hseq, ~0 tokens
§180 leftover sweep	24	byte-perfect drafts already on disk from waves M/O/P/R/S

Fleet 96.0% instr-weighted · 91.7% distinct-code · 97.07% fn-count · MAIN 20.5%. (Session start: 95.6 / 90.8 / 96.92.)

THE ONE-LINE VERSION OF WHAT THIS SESSION LEARNED

Every single lever that moved the numbers was already computed and simply not carried anywhere. §193-A (the atlas's banked twin, discarded by the card builder) · §194-E (tu_ref, the banked neighbour in the destination TU) · §196 (decl_prior, the fleet's declaration consensus) · §198 (the UNKNOWN lever lane, excluded by a default flag while the PROMPT told agents to draft it) · §200 (the asm-label alias, an idiom the project already used and the tools could not parse) · gap_triage (the harvest's majority verdict is a text search). Before adding an agent, an attempt, or a prompt paragraph, ask what the tree already knows.

THE SEVEN RESULTS THAT OUTLIVE THE COUNT

1. RECONCILIATION BELONGS INSIDE THE WAVE. One agent per gate group runs the deterministic ladder over its OWN slate before the first rebuild. Wave R banked 18 of 45 and needed a recovery lane; waves T-Y banked 70/70, 73/73, 68/69, 68/70, 62/63, 64/69. Costs one agent per group.
2. THE CARD IS THE CHEAPEST PLACE IN THE PIPELINE TO PUT A FACT. seed_ref (banked 51/51 on wave U's draw vs exemplar 0/73) took wave U to 100% drafted at 15% fewer tokens and 64% of the wall-clock. tu_ref reaches 48-64 cards per wave. decl_prior answers the arity guess §195-A proved the asm cannot answer. Every field costs zero tokens per wave, forever.
3. §198 — THE SELECTOR WAS OVERRIDING THE DOCTRINE. UNKNOWN held 607 of 1,179 in-band members, more than every other lane combined, and --levers excluded it while the prompt told agents it drafts like any other lane. Promoted (measured 71/71 drafted, 68 banked, 24.3 drafts/rebuild). Recorded cost: zero siblings — UNKNOWN groups are singletons.
4. §200 — THE ALIAS IS THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION ESCAPE. Only the LINK name has to agree: extern u8 aD8018A800[] __asm__("D_8018A800");. Five refusal classes, one move, five still MATCH, four re-gated — during a total API outage, by hand, at zero agent cost. Ordering: adopt the TU's spelling -> cast at the use site -> alias.
5. FOUR SELF-CORRECTIONS IN ONE SESSION. §194-E corrected §193-A · §199-A byte-refuted §189-A · §197-A refuted §136-9's cure · §201-A caught decl_prior's address-keyed DEF row before wave Z launched. A law from one wave is a first draft; the next wave is its review. This is the adversarial verifier paying for itself, and it is why the harvest is a pipeline step.
6. THE §192 DEFECT CLASS, THREE MORE INSTANCES. The pre-gate ladder was main-only and said "clean" about it; sym_of returned the keyword void for pointer-to-function decls (189,301 verdicts corrected) and __asm__ for the project's own alias idiom (1,210 more); masked_diff dropped every internal j so a break-vs-return error read as MATCH. A tool written against one binary — or blind to one idiom — silently narrows its own domain and reports success over what is left.
7. THE HARVEST CONVERGES, AND THAT IS THE POINT. already-covered by wave: 61/71 (T), 44/64 (U), 76/67 (V), 41/68 (W), 56/63 (X), 53/67 (Y); confirmations 9, 14, 14, 4, 7, 5; wave Y's 8 rejections are the session high. Readers seeded with all prior passes cannot re-derive them.

Tooling shipped (all negative-controlled)

build_wave_atlas: --one-per-gid · --rank total · seed_ref/matched_n (§193-A) · tu_ref + null self-exemplars (§194-E) · decl_prior rows (§196), now per-binary (§201-A) · UNKNOWN in the default lane (§198) · NEW tools/decl_prior.py (67,558 symbols; DEF keyed by binary) · NEW tools/gap_triage.py (harvest pre-filter; wired as step 0 of the harvest prompt, SETUP.md row, named in the wave-closing memory) · gate_main: _stubs_for · sym_of x2 · norm_sig/sig_conflict · substitute(transform=) · common.h-derived aliases · pregate_check: overlay driver transform, builtin->WARN, block-scope typedefs, [DROP] reporting, refuse-on-zero-files · masked_diff: internal j compared.

WAVE Z IS BUILT AND STAGED — DELIBERATELY NOT LAUNCHED (Drew's instruction)

75 cards / 6,517 ins / 8 GATE GROUPS (9.4 drafts per rebuild) · seed_ref 46 · tu_ref 50 · decl_prior 70 · 43 siblings staged. Binaries: ov_SC02_005 20 · ov_SC01_084 16 · ov_SC05_001 11 · ov_SC03_011 10 · ov_SC03_094 8 · md_MAIN_034 7 · md_SC03_075 2 · ov_SC06_018 1. Cards were REDRAWN after the §201-A fix — the first staging carried 24 poisoned DEF rows of 292; the current file has 0 poisoned and 24 withheld with a stated reason. To fire it:

Workflow({scriptPath: ".run/wave_p31z_workflow.js", args: <the object in .run/wave_z_args.json>})

Cards .run/wave_z_cards.json · siblings .run/wave_z_cards.siblings.json · wavedir .run/wave_p31z.

THE WAVE-CLOSING SEQUENCE (eight steps, memory wave-harvest-is-a-pipeline-step)

snapshot+verify+gate -> RECOVER the failures (near-miss / gate-drop / errored) -> gate the recovery -> family_sweep --hseq siblings -> R22 once -> harvest+bank idioms (run gap_triage first) -> build the next wave's cards -> CHECKPOINT, always, written for a fresh session — and refresh it if any work lands after it.

Known-open items

• func_8017FCFC (ov_SC02_017, closeness 3) — the ONE wave-Y near-miss not recovered. Its agent attributed the last 3 instructions to sched1 by elimination (oracle_reorder bypass+as -O2 = 9 diffs so NOT an assembler artifact; -fno-schedule-insns2 alone does not fix it; -fno-schedule-insns alone fixes idx 25-27 and breaks 50-52). Permuter fuel, not a hand lever.
• func_80184F18 (wave V, closeness 9) · func_80184500 (wave W, closeness 4) · func_8017F9D8 (wave X, closeness 1 — 93 of 94 words identical, a branch landing one instruction early).
• func_80031A98 — the D_800C5328 wall, unchanged. The 6 §188 SDK objects -> psyq_integrate. GsSortBg/GsSortFastBg fragment merges. gfx2D_BG0_OBJ_4D8 (§181 mirror class).
• Two wave-W cards released back to the pool (agents died on rate limits, no draft): func_80185480, func_8017EC98.

Watch-fors

• Transient API failures are normal at this scale and the recovery is always the same. Session limit (wave X harvest) and 529 Overloaded (wave Y recovery + harvest, four rounds, ~17 agents, 0 tokens) both resolved with Workflow({scriptPath, resumeFromRunId, args}) — cached agents replay, only the dead ones re-run (measured 398k vs the original 1.31M). Do not rebuild a wave by hand.
• A wave script's LAWS block is a JS template literal: backticks inside law text terminate it.
• gate_lane needs binary + name per slate record; scan_leftovers slates carry fn + draft.
• If a Reconcile agent dies, its group has NO slate — build it from the drafts on disk and run the ladder by hand (that is why the phase's product is a FILE, not an agent return value).
• pregate_check models the banking DRIVER: main goes through gate_main's hoist/strip, overlays through harvest_verify's strip_provided_typedefs. A third driver would need teaching.
• Snapshot every target's .s BEFORE gating — banking prunes it and recovery/harvest need both sides.

🛑 (superseded by S54/S55) SESSION CHECKPOINT — S54 FINAL (2026-08-17). Phase 31 CONTINUES. NOTHING IN FLIGHT.

HEAD commit:2541+ · tree clean except Ghidra db.*.gbf restart-noise (R23: do NOT stage) · R22 make check-all = 213 passed / 0 failed of 213 from a CLEAN tree (run 3x this session, after each wave) · EXE 143dbb89 · 0 NON_MATCHING. No process running, no cron armed, no workflow in flight. Drew pushes.

Banked this session: 547 functions (433 gated heads + 113 mechanical siblings + 1 main)

lane	banked	notes
wave T — mass band, 5 groups	70 of 70	zero drops — first wave ever to bank every byte-verified draft
wave U — mass band, 7 groups	73 of 73	100% drafted AND 100% banked; 15% fewer tokens, 64% of the wall-clock
wave V — mass band, 9 groups	68 of 69	8 of 9 groups clean
mechanical siblings (family_sweep --hseq)	49 + 34 + 25 = 108	~0 tokens; 9 failed of 112 attempts
wave W — UNKNOWN lane, 3 groups	68 of 70	71/71 drafted; 0 siblings (UNKNOWN groups are singletons)
wave X — UNKNOWN lane, 4 groups	62 of 63	2nd module binary clean; 1 sibling
wave Y — UNKNOWN lane, 5 groups	72	64 gate + 4 recovery (§200, 0 agent tokens) + 4 siblings
§180 leftover sweep	24	byte-perfect drafts already on disk from waves M/O/P/R/S

Fleet 96.0% instr-weighted · 91.7% distinct-code · 97.07% fn-count · MAIN 20.5%. (Session start: 95.6 / 90.8 / 96.92.)

THE FIVE RESULTS THAT OUTLIVE THE COUNT

1. RECONCILIATION BELONGS INSIDE THE WAVE. The only structural change from wave S was a Reconcile phase: one agent per gate group runs reconcile_slate --apply -> the §183 playbook -> pregate_check over its OWN slate, re-verifying every edit with match_one, BEFORE the first rebuild. Wave R banked 18 of 45 on its first slate and needed a recovery lane afterwards (§181: 26 of 27 rejections were byte-perfect drafts). Waves T/U/V banked 70/70, 73/73, 68/69. This is the single highest-leverage change of the session and it costs one agent per gate group.
2. §192 — THE PRE-GATE LADDER WAS MAIN-ONLY AND SAID "clean" ABOUT IT. pregate_check on an overlay slate printed checking 0 substituted file(s) ... clean. Four fixes, each controlled: per-binary _stubs_for(); sym_of no longer returns the keyword void for extern void (*D_x[])(...) (NC: 5,526,100 declarations, 189,301 changed verdicts, 0 regressions); C89's unspecified-parameter rule as gate_main.sig_conflict; the overlay DRIVER's typedef transform modelled. Plus §192b: the tool REFUSES when it substituted 0 files.
3. §193-A -> §194-E — THE CARD WAS HANDING AGENTS A DEAD POINTER. exemplar/sibs come from the atlas's OPEN set by construction, so they are stubs 0/34 measured — and on ~half the cards exemplar IS the card's own target. Meanwhile atlas.py:505-536 already computed a MATCHED-pool twin whose identity the card builder discarded. Cards now carry seed_ref (banked 51/51 on wave U's draw, 37/37 on wave V's) and tu_ref — banked functions in the card's OWN .c ranked by symbols shared with the target's .s relocations (48/70 cards on wave V; 62% of wave-T targets have such a neighbour vs 19% for the cross-overlay literal grep).
4. §195-D — AN INTERNAL j WAS INVISIBLE TO THE FAST ORACLE. masked_diff.mask_for short-circuited on the OPCODE ahead of the reloc dispatch, so every j .L… was dropped from the comparison. For a loop/switch arm that is the difference between break (execute the shared tail's calls) and return (skip them): byte-proven on ov_SC03_118:func_801825EC, where the two objects differ in ONE word (0800003e vs 08000041) and both reported MATCH. It blinded match_one, the permuter's scorer, family_cousins.tok and the atlas tiers at once. Fixed (mask only when reloc_kind == "26"); R39 control 35/35 banked drafts still MATCH. The similarity TOKENIZERS are deliberately left blind — everything they feed is byte-gated, and the raw field is position-dependent so including it naively would break sibling grouping.
5. THE HARVEST IS THE PRODUCT, AND ITS BIGGEST NUMBER IS "ALREADY COVERED". Three harvests: 9 CONFIRMED / 5 rejected / 61 already-covered (T), 14 / 5 / 44 (U), 14 / 9 / 76 (V) — 37 verified laws banked as §193-A..I, §194-A..N, §195-A..N. Two of §194 correct §193 entries written the SAME DAY (both cross-bannered). The already-covered majority is a RETRIEVAL problem, which is what tu_ref and the prompt's STEP 0b cookbook-search exist to fix.

Tooling shipped (all negative-controlled)

build_wave_atlas: --one-per-gid (collapse same-skeleton siblings to one card, defer the rest to the mechanical remap; R32 accounting asserted) · --rank total (rank gate groups by DELIVERED mass = card + deferred siblings) · seed_ref/matched_n (§193-A) · tu_ref + null self-exemplars (§194-E; operand-only .s symbol extraction — a naive uppercase regex read the comment column's hex words as symbols) · gate_main: _stubs_for, sym_of, norm_sig/sig_conflict, substitute(transform=), common.h-derived scalar aliases · pregate_check: driver-accurate overlay transform, builtin conflicts -> WARN (cc1-probed), block-scope typedefs skipped, [DROP] reporting, refuse-on-zero-files · masked_diff.mask_for: internal j compared.

NEXT SESSION — in order

1. make atlas FIRST, then wave W: build_wave_atlas --target-ins 6500 --min-ins 60 --max-ins 200 --rank total --one-per-gid --max-bins 10. Watch the gate-group count: waves T/U/V needed 5 -> 7 -> 9 groups for the same ~6,500 instructions. When it reaches ~12, the fleet-wide 60-200 mass band is thinning and the honest move is to re-open the band question with the velocity ledger, not to keep drawing.
2. Close the wave the same way every time (memory wave-harvest-is-a-pipeline-step): gate -> family_sweep --hseq --only <exemplar addrs> (after make sig-overlays + family_hseq.py) -> R22 clean-fleet -> harvest the index_gaps. Snapshot each target's .s BEFORE gating (.run/wave*_asm_snapshot/) — banking prunes it and the verifiers need both sides.
3. The typing/naming debt is now the largest non-matching liability (see the S54 note below): 9.5 casts per 100 lines, 749 distinct per-function invented typedefs vs 220 shared, parameters typed s32 that are really pointers. Not a matching problem; it is THE readability problem, and every retype is byte-checkable by the same gate (§185: grep and COUNT the use sites first).
4. Carry-overs: func_80184F18 (wave V, closeness 9, ~12 permutations pinned — permuter fuel); func_80031A98 (the D_800C5328 wall, unchanged); the 6 §188 SDK objects -> psyq_integrate; the GsSortBg/GsSortFastBg fragment merges; gfx2D_BG0_OBJ_4D8 (§181 mirror class).

Watch-fors

• gate_lane needs binary + name in its slate records; the leftover slates from scan_leftovers.py carry fn + draft only — add binary before gating.
• A wave script's LAWS block is a JS template literal: backticks inside the law text terminate it. Wave U's first launch died on exactly that; write law text with single quotes.
• pregate_check models the DRIVER: main goes through gate_main's hoist/strip, overlays through harvest_verify's strip_provided_typedefs. If you add a third banking driver, teach it the tool.
• A TU typedef defined BELOW the stubs that need it breaks the overlay path (the draft's copy is stripped, the survivor sits below). Hoisting is byte-neutral — null-control-build it first, as ov_SC02_005 was.

🛑 (superseded by S54) SESSION CHECKPOINT — S53 FINAL (2026-08-16/17). Phase 31 CONTINUES. NOTHING IN FLIGHT.

HEAD commit:2453+ · tree clean except Ghidra db.*.gbf restart-noise (R23: do NOT stage) · R22 make check-all = 213 passed / 0 failed of 213 from a clean tree · EXE 143dbb89 · 0 NON_MATCHING. No process running, no cron armed, no workflow in flight. 39 commits this session; Drew pushes.

Banked this session: 161 functions

lane	banked	notes
wave R — mass band	75	ov_SC06_029 36 · ov_SC02_005 21 · main 18
wave S — mass band	63	ov_SC04_011 30 of 45 · ov_SC03_028 33 of 34
the 27-draft recovery backlog	23	incl. 2 real fragment merges

main stubs 1,763 → 1,714 · MAIN game-code weighted 17.4% → 20.4% · fleet instr-weighted 95.6%, distinct-code 90.8% (was 90.7%), fn-count 96.92%. Remaining stubs in the four worked overlays: ov_SC02_005 315 · ov_SC04_011 199 · ov_SC03_028 161 · ov_SC06_029 134.

THE FOUR RESULTS THAT OUTLIVE THE COUNT

1. DRAFTING IS SOLVED AT THIS SCALE; INTEGRATION IS THE ENTIRE COST. Wave R drafted 84%, wave S 70/71 = 99% (82 agents, 0 errors). Of 27 gate-rejected main drafts, 26 were byte-correct and rejected purely on declaration plumbing (§181 census). Three independent measurements now agree (§180b's cold pile 11/32, wave P's 97%→68%, this census). Budget for banking, not cracking; an hour spent making the integration layer COMPUTE a refusal outranks an hour of drafting.
2. §188 — THE jr $ra + addiu $sp EPILOGUE TAIL IS AN ASSEMBLER ARTIFACT, NOT CODEGEN. GNU as -O2 fills the return delay slot; cc1 CANNOT emit that shape for any $s-saving frame (mips.c:5081/5174/5204). This corrects §177's row 2 in place (banner added), answers §182's open question, and explains why that lane converted 4 of 16. tools/oracle_reorder.py now separates a C defect from an assembler artifact in one 2×2 — a 0 in the bypass+as -O2 cell means the draft is already right and grinding is futile. Six functions in that band are prebuilt SDK objects (libpad pdent3/4/5, pdmain1, pdmaiini, libapi first.o) → psyq_integrate.
3. §187 — THE libgs SHORTCUT IS REFUTED, AND THE LESSON IS ABOUT THE ORACLE. src/800b_7.c really is GsSortBg/GsSortFastBg = 2D_BG0.o/2D_BG1.o, but the game's build carries six extra GTE hazard nops: 520 object instructions vs a 526-instruction region. Two checks (the agent's and my own) called it a match because both excused a whole word whenever it carried a relocation. A mask coarser than the linker's is not weak evidence, it is no evidence, and agreement between two loose checks is not corroboration (R34). Reverted; those 8 symbols stay decomp work.
4. COMMENT-BLINDNESS WAS A DEFECT CLASS, NOT A BUG (§184). Three tools were comparing C text without masking comments, so identical layouts read as DIFFERENT-STRUCT because agents annotate fields and the TU does not — each silently refusing byte-verified work. Related: scan_leftovers.py found 37 byte-perfect, still-stubbed drafts (3,240 ins) on its first run — a wave targets ~6,500 ins, so sweep .run/ before spending a token on new cards (§180).

Tooling shipped this session (all negative-controlled)

NEW scan_leftovers.py (re-verify unbanked drafts; the .s-existence oracle) · NEW fragment_check.branched_into (the MIRROR trap: a sibling branches INTO your range; 5.7% of main stubs, 0% in the wave-S overlays) · NEW tools/oracle_reorder.py (§188's diagnostic) · gate_main: typedef HOIST above the include block (byte-neutral, SHA-proven) + comment-blind comparison fixed + FORWARD typedef stripped instead of renamed · pregate_check: masked-text scan + ANY return-type disagreement now FAILs + brace-bodied externs visible · reconcile_slate: comment-blind struct comparison fixed.

Cookbook: §180–§191 (24 entries) — see the section list in the S53 progress-log entries above

The S53 journal harvest is DONE — do not redo it: 10 readers over 247 wave-R/S verdicts, one adversarial verifier per candidate defaulting to REJECT → 10 CONFIRMED / 4 WEAK / 4 REJECTED (.run/s53_harvest.json; §191 records the rejects). Verifiers rebuilt targets from the ROM where the .s was pruned on bank, re-ran their own A/B sweeps, and caught a wrong mechanism comment at src/800.c:5430.

NEXT SESSION — in order

1. Wave T. make atlas FIRST (it predates 161 banks), then build_wave_atlas --target-ins 6500 --min-ins 60 --max-ins 200 --rank mass fleet-wide — NOT --only-bins main, whose mass band is spent (§180c). Then the pre-gate ladder BEFORE the first rebuild: reconcile_slate --apply → fragment_check → pregate_check → gate_main dry-run until N -> N compatible, 0 dropped. Gate with bisect_slate.py, never gate_main --apply without --no-bisect. Overlays: convert slates to gate_lane shape first (it needs binary + name).
2. The 6 SDK objects from §188 Law 3 → psyq_integrate. Cheapest instructions on the board, and the identification came FROM the strict oracle (unlike §187's refuted claim). Verify with psyq_identify + a clean rebuild.
3. The 15 wave-S rejects in ov_SC04_011. That overlay's declaration landscape is the known hostile one (6/10 also failed there in wave O). Run the §183 playbook lane; wave R's equivalent converted 20 of 21.
4. GsSortBg / GsSortFastBg fragment merges (6 symbols / 526 ins; 2 symbols / 496 ins). §187 removed the link shortcut, so this is the honest route. A merged draft exists at .run/final10/main/gfx2D_BG0_OBJ_4D8.c (526/526 ins, 260 mismatched) with the full boundary map in the final-10 verdicts. Merge recipe that worked twice this session: build a synthetic merged .s (fragments concatenated in address order, interior j <symbol> rewritten to j .L<addr>), verify with match_one against THAT, then hand-substitute the body at the entry symbol's INCLUDE_ASM line and delete the other fragments' lines — the whole-binary rebuild is the real oracle.
5. Do NOT re-run the §177 epilogue lane (§182/§188). Use oracle_reorder.py to file the assembler-artifact cases IMMOVABLE instead of drafting them.

Known-open items

• func_80031A98 — the one honest wall. An agent PROVED with a minimal cc1 repro that the block-scope extern s16 D_800C5328[][2]; is a hard error against the file-scope flat decl, and all three escapes (local 2-D pointer, inline cast, TU retype) fail. Unblock cost: retype 7 declarations + 4 banked assignments in func_80030A14/func_8003750C, then re-verify THEIR bytes.
• func_80186020 (closeness 5) — grinder/permuter fuel, NOT a hand-lever target: survived ~900 compiles across 11 sweeps of a fully-understood global.c:allocno_compare tie-break (§186c).
• The AGREE re-gate lane stays CLOSED (measured 5%, S52). Do not reopen.

Watch-fors

• The pgrep bracket trick protects only the PATTERN — a waiter whose command line names the file elsewhere (e.g. in a tail) never exits (§180d). Cost this session: a 46-min loop on a finished job.
• gate_main --apply prints BANKED — verify corpus.stubs() actually dropped before committing.
• corpus.stubs() refuses (correctly) when a binary's .s files are missing: after make clean, only the binaries you re-extracted can be queried. make extract-all restores the fleet.
• tools/make_libgs.sh is not executable — run it as bash tools/make_libgs.sh.
• psyq_link_region.py --verify inside make_libgs.sh is STALE (missing the Phase-9-required --vram-base/--exe) and reports only the objects it could PLACE — a silently smaller set.
• A workflow killed by the session usage limit resumes cleanly: Workflow({scriptPath, resumeFromRunId, args}) replays completed agents from cache and re-runs only the interrupted ones (proven twice).

SESSION S52 TASK LIST (2026-08-15, ultracode) — the monitorable view (no TaskCreate tool in this harness build)

• S52-1 — Preflight + wave-selector repair. Tree clean @ commit:2390, no gate/grinder in flight. Fixed build_wave_atlas.py: (a) the already-waved set was a hardcoded 'abcdefghijkl' wave-letter literal → now a glob('.run/wave_*_cards.json') derivation (R33); NC: old 634 → new 726 taken, strict superset, +92 previously-missable cards from waves m/n; (b) --exclude-bins defaulted to main carrying the REFUTED link-defect rationale → default now empty, help corrected to the real (gate-path) reason; (c) new --only-bins allow-list (main waves need it — gate_main rebuilds once per SLATE, so main has no per-TU gate cost).
• S52-2 — Atlas regen (make atlas, $0) — the selector was stale by ~448 banks (last regen predates waves J–N).
• S52-8 — gate_lane crash-vs-empty fixed. A non-zero rc or a missing JSON line is now labelled ‼ CRASH, prints the stderr tail, records {'CRASH':True,…} in the results JSON, lists the never-gated groups in the summary, and exits non-zero. R39 NC both ways: crash→CRASH, honest-empty→not-CRASH.
• [~] S52-3 — Wave O: MAIN + the UNKNOWN probe — LAUNCHED (wf_278b05de-bae, 49 cards / 6,266 ins, 2 gate groups). The selection finding that reshaped this wave: main's agent-lane pool at ≥20 ins is nearly SPENT (21 left after 113 already waved) — main's remaining 52,714 ins are overwhelmingly UNKNOWN-lever, as are 138k fleet-wide. So wave O is deliberately three arms: 21 main head-crack (avg 145 ins, opus) + 18 main UNKNOWN (avg 122) + 10 overlay UNKNOWN (ov_SC04_011, avg 103, sonnet). The UNKNOWN arms are an R37 probe of the biggest unclaimed block on the atlas — 1,239 candidates at 60–120 ins alone. Wave prompt gained §175/§176A–C (statement-order-around-a-call first; pin the interloper; a pin cannot schedule across a call and can silently DELETE an instruction).
• S52-4 — Independent re-verify (R14) + gate_main.py --apply (one clean rebuild per slate).
• S52-5 — R22 clean fleet 213/213 + commit (task + this log together).
• S52-6 — Wave P: overlay TU-packed, drafted concurrently with the main gate (drafting is tree-free).
• S52-7 — 11 conflict-dropped main drafts recovered (waves J/K/L). All 11 re-verified MATCH standalone; the TU-aware gate_main then named 7 real TU conflicts the old check missed entirely, all repaired by adopting the TU's declaration verbatim + casting at the use site — including a NEW variant, casting the CALLEE through a function pointer when the TU prototypes it (void) and your call must pass an argument (((void (*)(s32))func_8001C9D0)(a0)). All 11 re-verified MATCH after repair; slate now 11/11 compatible, staged for the next main rebuild. None needed a codegen change — every one was plumbing. Cookbook §176d.
• S52-10 — tools/reloc_identity.py (NEW): the oracle that DISAGREES with match_one about symbol identity (R34). match_one masks relocations, so it cannot see a wrong callee or a wrong global (§174 law 1c). But the target .s comment column is the FINAL LINKED WORD, so the true address behind each masked field is recoverable arithmetically and symbols*.txt maps it back to a name — $0, no rebuild, and it names the fix. Three of its own bugs were caught by its negative controls before any verdict was believed: splat-derived func_/D_ names aren't in the symbol files (first run checked ZERO relocs while reporting clean — R32); a 0x4000 nearest-symbol window mislabelled func_8001C9D0 as SsGetMute+0xC50; and MIPS o32 REL relocations keep the addend IN THE INSTRUCTION, so reading it off the operand string fabricated a mismatch for every struct-field/array access (the +1/+2/+3 signature on func_801F0734 was a byte-array walk, not three symbol errors). Also refuses to answer when streams aren't index-aligned.
• [~] S52-11 — The 88-draft "MATCH but gate-rejected" pile, triaged deterministically for $0. Result: 68 AGREE · 12 MISMATCH · 8 COMPILE-FAIL. The 12 split into two named, actionable classes: uniform-delta stale seed symbols (§171 — func_80130D48 all 5 relocs off by exactly 0xD1EC, func_8016D688 all 5 by 0x65450 → aprop_symfix STALE-DELTA rebase) and wrong field offsets (func_80185D6C +0x10, func_8017F060 +0x4, func_80188720 +0xC). --fix then mechanically repaired 10 of the 12 (2 correctly REFUSED as SYMBOL-COLLAPSE — one draft extern standing in for two distinct globals, which a rename cannot fix). MISMATCH 12 → 2, AGREE 68 → 77.
• S52-12 — LANE KILLED BY MEASUREMENT (R37). Re-gating 20 of the AGREE drafts (5 groups) banked 1 — 5%, statistically identical to the project's existing A10 stored-verdict law (~0–8%; T1 measured 0/23 on the same kind of pile earlier this phase). The null is the finding: symbol verification does NOT improve stored-draft re-gate conversion — a stored draft's rejection is almost never identity, it is TU plumbing or staleness. So reloc_identity's real home is as a pre-gate check on FRESH drafts (seconds, removes a whole failure class before the rebuild), NOT as a backlog resurrection tool. The remaining 30 groups are NOT worth 30 rebuilds; lane closed. Banked func_80186C44 + propagation. R38 self-note: the 0/23 prior was already in this very log — I should have started from ~8%, not from optimism.
• S52-8 — Tooling debt: gate_lane swallows gate_stage stderr (reports a crash as 0/0/0).
• S52-9 — Bank idioms into the cookbook + refresh this checkpoint BEFORE any pause (memory bank-idioms-before-checkpoint).

📐 THE WAVE DOCTRINE (adopted 2026-08-15 by Drew, after wave O) — 6,000+ INSTRUCTIONS PER WAVE

A wave is sized by INSTRUCTION MASS, not by card count. The public metric is instruction- weighted, so a wave is worth what its instructions are worth. The card lanes (12–42-ins cousins) carried ~1,400 ins/wave ≈ 0.011pp of fleet ⇒ ~440 waves to finish. Wave O carried 6,266 ins for the same gate cost and the same draft rate (47/49). That is the shape from here on.

The recipe (--target-ins implements it; the tool now refuses to under-fill silently):

.venv/bin/python tools/build_wave_atlas.py .run/wave_<id>_cards.json 80 \
    --target-ins 6500 --min-ins 60 --max-ins 200 --max-bins 4 \
    --levers head-crack,seeded-crack,redraft,len-vein,integration,family-sweep,UNKNOWN

• --target-ins 6500 — draw cards until the instruction budget is met (capped by n).
• --min-ins 60 --max-ins 200 — the mass band. Draft rate barely decays with size (wave M 98% at avg 51, wave N 92% at avg 65, wave O 96% at avg 128), so size is nearly free mass.
• --max-bins 4 — gate cost scales with (binary, TU) GROUPS, not drafts.
• UNKNOWN is now a first-class lane (see below). main needs --only-bins main + gate_main.

THE UNKNOWN UNLOCK (wave O's strategic result). UNKNOWN is not a difficulty label — it is "the atlas could not name a lever". Wave O ran 22 UNKNOWN cards as an R37 probe and they drafted like any other lane. That moves ~138k ins into reach and re-scopes the whole endgame:

pool (agent-draftable, incl. UNKNOWN)	fns	ins	waves @6k
mass band 60–200 ins	1,762	164,357	27
40–59 ins	1,752	84,009	14
<40 ins (the old card lanes)	5,585	132,466	22
>200 ins	125	36,493	6
total agent-draftable	9,224	417,325 = 70% of all open ins	69

Non-agent levers hold the remaining ~175k ins (extend-tell, jtbl-carve, cc1, o0-lane, swaprepeat, needs-autopsy, plumbing, frame-172) and still need their own lanes. Order of work: the mass band first — 27 waves covering 164k ins, and it is where the instruction-weighted metric moves fastest per agent spent.

THE PRE-GATE PROTOCOL (do all five, in order — wave O proved each one earns its place):

1. Independently re-verify every claimed MATCH with match_one (R14). Agent self-reports run optimistic; wave O happened to agree exactly (47/49), earlier waves did not (wave C claimed 35/35 → 32 banked; the main probe claimed 6/6 → 4).
2. tools/reloc_identity.py --batch — the symbol-identity check match_one structurally cannot do. Seconds, $0, and it removes a whole failure class before a rebuild is spent. (Wave O: 46 AGREE / 0 MISMATCH — the first wave of the campaign with zero symbol errors.)
3. gate_main.py <slate> DRY RUN, and iterate until N -> N compatible, 0 dropped. Conflicts surface one layer at a time; each fix reveals the next.
4. Reconcile declarations toward the form the MATCH needs, never arbitrarily (§176f) — then re-verify every converted draft, because a declaration change is a codegen change.
5. Gate. main → gate_main.py --apply (one clean rebuild per slate). Overlays → gate_lane.

Campaign velocity ledger (T10+)

wave	lane	cards	standalone MATCH	banked	tokens	tok/bank	lesson banked
O	mass — main head-crack + main UNKNOWN + overlay UNKNOWN (49 cards / 6,266 ins)	49	47/49 = 96% / 6,040 ins (my independent re-verify agreed exactly)	50 — 46 main in ONE clean rebuild (143dbb89 byte-identical) + 4 overlay	~12.8M	~256k	THE 6k-INS WAVE SHAPE + THE UNKNOWN UNLOCK. 4.4× the card lanes' mass at the same gate cost; UNKNOWN drafts like any lane (⇒ 138k ins re-scoped into reach). First wave with 0 symbol errors (reloc_identity pre-gate). Declaration reconciliation took the slate 5-dropped → 0 dropped, and 3 of 4 conflicts were load-bearing CODEGEN (§176f). Gate cost 8 attempts: 2 my errors, 3 real tool defects now fixed (typedef ordering, silent bisect-on-build-failure, short≠s16 over-refusal), 3 reconciliation rounds
A	adapt SMALL-EDIT	24	18 (75%)	12 (+1 prop)	~1.40M	~117k	zero stale seed-symbols (the §171 prompt-law works); 6 gate-fails all INTEGRATION shapes (3× decl-type vs TU, 1 arity, 2 TU-context DIFF) → wave-B prompt adds match-the-TU's-existing-decl
grinder-1	permuter	10	—	0	$0	—	func_800CB4CC parked at best-1 (warmstart seed); queue enriched +59+6 records since
C-probe	tell (3)	3	1 (33%)	1	~300k	~300k	§174 Law 4: the TU's decl of YOUR OWN fn constrains the def sig — standalone MATCH gated 0/1 until canonical-sig + cast-at-use; tell attribution unreliable (2/3 residuals were a different class)
C	tell 11 + weak 24	35	35 (100%)	32 (8 propagated ×2)	~2.39M	~75k	Law 4 in-prompt → 0 symbol fails, 91% gate; weak lane 24/24 on haiku — the 890-card vein is live; 3 NEAR → grinder
E-probe	mass/main (6)	6	4 (67%)	0	~474k	—	main is agent-draftable but LINK-BLOCKED: 1 byte-correct fn ⇒ 2-byte whole-EXE diff, a jal retargeted game-code→PsyQ-archive symbol. Not a matching wall. gate_lane main-blindness fixed en route
D	adapt (48)	48	47 (98%)	45 (40 main gate + 5 late-repair, 2 gates)	~4.48M	~100k	repair stage rescued 5/6 first-pass DIFFs → gate them in a SECOND slate (the first slate is built before the repair stage lands); 23 gate groups for 42 drafts = the throughput ceiling → build_wave_atlas.py now packs by (binary,TU) = the real gate-group key; 1 NEAR at close=1 DELAY-SLOT → grinder
MAIN	mass/atlas main probe (4 drafts, re-gated CLEAN)	4	4	4 BANKED — the first main-EXE functions of the campaign	$0 (re-used the wave-E probe drafts)	—	func_80013228/func_8001CB00/func_800142C8 (src/800.c) + func_8001099C (src/boot.c, -O0). make clean && make extract BINARY=main && make build BINARY=main → 143dbb89 BYTE-IDENTICAL. These are the SAME drafts the incremental gate rejected 0/4 — the drafts were right, the gate path was wrong
M	mass/atlas — overlay, LARGER band (44)	44	43/44 shape-verified / 2,212 of 2,249 ins	40 banked, ONE gate group; R22 213/213	~4.41M	~110k	The band test. Cards avg 51 ins (up to 112) vs the 12–42-ins cousins the night opened with, and the draft rate HELD at 98%. Since the public metric is instruction-weighted, this is the band that moves it — and it is reachable by haiku/sonnet, not only the frontier tier. 1 NEAR (close=9, beqz+delay-slot reorder) → grinder
L	mass/atlas — MAIN (44)	44	44/44 = 100%	42 banked (2 dropped: dup SVECTOR typedef + u8[]-vs-char[]) — main 133 → 175	~1.96M	~47k	First wave carrying law 1c. The compile-error shortcut named SVECTOR at src/800.c:94 + the exact draft in SECONDS where the old bisect burned 28 min. Drove the gate_main typedef-stripper fix
K	mass/atlas — MAIN (44)	44	44/44 = 100% / 674 ins	re-gating (41 compatible / 3 conflict-dropped) — an earlier "43 banked" report of mine was WRONG, see below	~2.36M	—	Third perfect sweep, all haiku. tools/gate_main.py (NEW) drove it: substitute batch → make extract BINARY=main → make build → SHA, with bisection. MY TOOL BUG, caught by R22 not by the tool: gate_main said BYTE-IDENTICAL, then the clean fleet check failed [FAIL] main. Cause: my typesig() split on the symbol name and kept only the PREFIX, so u8 D_x and u8 D_x[] compared EQUAL — three drafts declared D_80078D98 inconsistently (1 scalar, 2 array) and the conflict reached the build. Fixed to keep the declarator suffix; NC'd both ways (wave-K conflict now caught; wave-J answer unchanged). Both failure modes are now on record in the tool: v1 too STRICT (compared parameter names → discarded 2 good drafts), v2 too COARSE (ignored [] → passed a real conflict).
J	mass/atlas — MAIN (40)	40	39/40 = 98% / 917 of 940 ins	34 BANKED (5 dropped for in-TU decl conflicts, 1 DIFF) — main now 38 matched	~2.65M	~78k	First full wave against the main EXE, and it drafts like any overlay (98%, all haiku). Gated by the clean-rebuild batch path: substitute → make extract BINARY=main → make build BINARY=main → 143dbb89 BYTE-IDENTICAL. NEW CLASS — in-TU cross-draft decl conflicts: batching N drafts into ONE .c means their externs must agree with EACH OTHER, not just with the file (D_800A4ED4 s16-vs-u16; func_8001C9D0 void/void*/s32). Resolved greedily (keep-in-order, drop incompatible): cost 5. Dropped set is recoverable next session via cast-at-use — the same lever that fixed func_80037368 (extern u8 D_80076251; verbatim from src/shared/clearTbl40.h + (&D_80076251)[i])
I	mass/atlas (44)	44	44/44 = 100% / 1,602 ins, symfix clean ×44	44 BANKED, ONE gate group	~4.27M	~97k	Second perfect sweep; 41 of 44 drawn by haiku. Gate reported 0/0/0 twice — an unreported gate_stage CRASH (corpus.CorpusError: 16 missing .s, fallout from MY make clean), not a result. Binary then built byte-identical with all 44 substituted; R22 213/213 confirmed (batch included a fleet-shared engine_core.h arity fix)
H	mass/atlas (40)	40	38 (95%) / 1,820 of 1,902 ins	34 of 38, ONE gate group	~5.05M	~149k	2 NEARs banked as permuter fuel with strong diagnoses. SAFETY FINDING: a register __asm__("$2") PIN CAN BE A CORRECTNESS BUG, not just a scheduling choice — on func_80182EB0 a value was written before a call and read after it; the hard-reg pin made gcc treat the pre-call store as dead across the call and silently DROP addiu v0,zero,-1 (49 vs 50 ins), then read garbage. Dropping the pin + storing the constant directly before the call recovered it and closed 19/25. Pins are our most-used lever — this failure mode needs a cookbook note
G	mass/atlas (36)	36	36/36 = 100% (independently re-verified) / 2,554 ins	32 of 33 gated in ONE gate group; fleet 95.3→95.4%	~3.16M	~99k	Best draft rate of the campaign, on FRESH CRACKS. 3 held by the symfix audit for inventing symbol names where the target calls PsyQ RotTransSV/RotMatrixY — the just-fixed non-hex handling earned its keep immediately (pre-fix, one such name crashed the whole audit). Pattern: agents reconstruct the CODE reliably and guess PsyQ SYMBOL NAMES unreliably; the deterministic audit is what catches it
F	mass/atlas (60) — the TU-packed experiment	60	55 (91%) pre-repair → 59/60 post-repair / 3,508 ins	56 total (50 + 6 stragglers) of 60, 1 rebuild each	~7.16M	~143k	THE WAVE SHAPE FOR THE REST OF THE CAMPAIGN. Fresh-crack lane (no proven body to edit) converts like the seeded lanes; ~3× mass/card (avg 48 ins vs 12–42); 1 rebuild for 50 banks vs wave D's 23 rebuilds for 45. 2 genuine STALE (agents invented S80131E00/Mat32_… where the target calls PsyQ Square0/RotMatrixY) held back; 5 "local-only" flags are just local type names (harmless). Straggler batch pending: the repair stage rescued ~6 more AFTER the slate was built (same lesson as wave D — build the slate after the repair stage lands)

• 2026-08-14 — CAMPAIGN OPEN (T10+, Ultracode). Wave A: 24 adapt cards → 18/24 standalone (75%) → symfix-first (0 stale — the prompt-law worked) → gate 12 banked + 1 propagation (~117k tok/bank e2e; stubs → 12,030). 6 NEARs (3 at close ≤3) enqueued to the grinder. Wave B (48 cards, all haiku, 29 binaries) launched with the decl-matching lesson. Grinder pass 1: 0/10 but func_800CB4CC at best-1.

• 2026-08-14 (resume session) — Checkpoint resume steps 1–2 DONE. (1) R22 owed proof banked: make clean && make extract-all && make check-all → 213 passed, 0 failed of 213 (.run/r22_p31_resume.log EXIT=0) — wave B's banks verified fleet-clean. (2) make atlas regenerated at HEAD commit:2234: 363,525 feature rows / 92,855 distinct bodies (0 newly computed — memo hit); 5,144 groups / 11,994 open instances / 612,325 ins; warm merges 1,014; seeded 4,710/7,247 skeletons; all assertions green. Open count 12,058→11,994 reconciles with the session's 65 banks. (3) Wave C fuel verified: .run/wave_p31c_cards.json = 38 cards (14 tell/sonnet + 24 weak/haiku); grinder idle (heartbeat done); gate free. Drew's re-extraction question answered (disc/splat layers gain nothing — deterministic + continuously regenerated; sig/atlas layer regenerated by this step; Ghidra-C re-analysis = targeted-probe candidate only, R37). NOTE: this harness build has no TaskCreate tool — this checklist + log is the monitorable task view (R28 noted plainly).

• 2026-08-14 (resume session, cont.) — WAVE C COMPLETE: 32 banked, R22 213/213. Probe→wave cadence (§174 law 3) paid: the 3-card probe cost ~300k tok and returned Law 4, which the 35-card wave then converted at 91% gate with zero symbol failures. Independent re-verify of all 35 drafts by me (R14) before gating: 35/35 MATCH held. Reach measured honestly: 32 exemplars, only 8 had any sharer, each ×2 → ~1.25× effective. The ×134 era is over (P25/29/30 harvested the shared cores); fleet-% now moves ~1:1 with exemplars banked, so THROUGHPUT is the lever, not leverage.

  • THREE instrument defects found+fixed in my own new tooling this cycle (the R32/R35/R39 class, and the reason R39 exists): (1) build_wave.py's gate-guard used pgrep -f via shell=True — the wrapping sh -c carries the pattern in its own cmdline so it self-matched and refused forever; fixed by invoking pgrep without a shell. (2) The open-stub predicate did fn in corpus.stubs(binary) — but stubs() returns addr→Stub, so every card looked "already-banked" and BOTH pools reported ~0 candidates (I nearly concluded the 622-card adapt pile and 954-card weak pile were spent). Fixed to {st.symbol for st in ...values()} and negative-controlled against the known population (35 wave-C cards, 32 banked → exactly 3 still open: PASS). (3) I fired wave D once with hand-typed placeholder card names instead of the generated file — caught and stopped within a minute, relaunched from .run/wave_p31d_args.json. Recorded, not buried (P9).
  • Pools are NOT spent (post-fix, honest): adapt 569 candidates, weak 890 candidates.
  • STRATEGIC (Drew's question "why are our waves so weak?" — he is right): the card lanes I have been drawing from are the mechanical leftovers (12–42-ins cousins), ≈1,400 ins/wave against 612,325 open ins ≈ 0.23%/wave. The Atlas already maps where the mass actually is: head-crack 1,276 groups / 4,248 inst / 186,291 ins (≈3.3 inst per group — a group head crack banks its members), UNKNOWN 1,964 / 138,597, extend-tell 575 / 76,730, redraft 280 / 46,769, jtbl-carve 190 / 45,673. And high-reach groups DO remain: gid 96f8b78ec8d3 = 265 instances / 6,084 ins (integration lever, 31-ins exemplar), 75cec648ba15 = 116 inst / 3,002 ins, 152d63c1086d = 64 inst / 1,559 ins. Next: build the wave generator off .run/atlas.json groups (top instruction-mass first, routed by the group's measured lever) instead of the leftover card piles.

• 2026-08-14 (resume session, cont. 2) — THE TARGETING CORRECTION (Drew's "why are our waves so weak?" — he was right). Measured the arithmetic: 635,744 ins open (4.7pp of fleet) across 11,994 fns; the adapt/weak card piles I had been drawing are the 12–42-ins best-seeded tail ⇒ ~1,440 ins/wave = 0.011pp/wave ≈ 440 waves to finish. The mass is elsewhere: cousin-multi 294k ins (avg 44), cold 183k (avg 82, no seed), main-only 38k (avg 87). TWO fixes:

  1. tools/build_wave_atlas.py (NEW) — wave selection off .run/atlas.json, on two measured principles: (a) gate cost scales with (binary,TU) GROUPS, not drafts — each group is a whole-binary rebuild, and wave C was 35 drafts over 27 groups = 1.3 drafts/rebuild (~50 min of gate for 32 banks); the atlas selector concentrates a wave into few binaries (96 drafts → 1 group, ~70× the gate efficiency); (b) mass beats count for the instr-weighted metric. 7,430 draftable candidates available in the agent-lever bands.
  2. gate_lane was STRUCTURALLY BLIND TO main (R36/R33): it located a stub's home .c by glob('src/<binary>/*.c'), but main's sources live at src/*.c → every main draft grouped under src=None. Latent because main has never been wave-gated (main = 79,510 weighted ins at 0.5%, the largest coherent mass left). Fixed to derive from corpus.stubs()[..].path; NC'd 3 ways (still-open wave-C drafts 3/3 agree · overlay sample 96/96 agree · main now resolves None→src/800.c).
  • MAIN PROBE (6 cards, R37 — never spend 96 agents on an unproven path): 4/6 standalone MATCH (67%), including the -O0 boot-module fn func_8001099C (the main-specific trap: asm/nonmatchings/boot → src/boot.c is -O0 per §6, so match_one needs --o0; flagged in the mass-lane prompt). Main is agent-draftable. Gate result pending.
  • RULE VIOLATION CAUGHT (P9, recorded): a wave-E agent wrote its body directly into src/boot.c instead of its draft dir — caught by git status, reverted, gate re-run clean. A dirty tree ABORTS the shared gate for the whole wave, so the wave prompt's HARD RULES were hardened (explicit "never write into the tree, not even to test; no state-changing git commands").
  • Wave D (48 adapt cards) drafted 47/48 concurrently — drafting and gating overlap safely (drafts land in .run/, the gate writes src/).

• 2026-08-14 (resume session, cont. 3) — MAIN'S BLOCKER DIAGNOSED — it is LINK-LEVEL, not matching. Main probe: 4/6 standalone MATCH (my independent re-verify; the workflow's own repair stage claimed 6/6 — the gate and my check disagree with the agents, R14), then gate 0/4 banked, 4 near. Reproduced one (func_80013228, a clean 27-ins Square0 wrapper) through harvest_verify and byte-diffed the built EXE against the original: exactly 2 bytes differ in 413,696, and NOT inside the drafted function — a jal at vaddr 0x80060E74 retargeted from func_80061FA8 (game code, build/src/800c2.o) to firstfile/firstfile2 (PsyQ libapi object build/psyq/apicard/A66.o, symbols.us.txt line: firstfile2 = 0x80062248). So adding ONE byte-correct C function to src/800.c perturbs symbol resolution between game code and the LINKED PsyQ library objects — the C is right; the link binds a call to a different definition. This is main-specific (main is the only binary with psyq_integrate archive objects, per the ifeq ($(BINARY),main) blocks) and explains why main has sat at 0.5%: it is an INTEGRATION wall, not a matching wall. Main is NOT ready for bulk waves; it needs a named link-resolution investigation lane (candidate leads: duplicate .NON_MATCHING symbol definitions visible in the map at both Square0 and func_80061FA8; archive-member selection order when a new undefined ref appears in src/800.o). Recorded here + decision-log (R31). The 4 main drafts are preserved in .run/wave_p31e/main/ as fuel for that lane.

• 2026-08-14 — Campaign returned to the lanes that bank. Wave D (48 adapt cards) drafted; independent re-verify 42/48 MATCH (87.5%); 6 DIFF handed to the near/grinder path. Gating now.

• 2026-08-15 — Wave D closed: 45/48 banked. R22 clean fleet 213/213. Stubs 12,059 → 11,876 (183 banked this phase; ~118 tonight). Committed commit:2324. Wave F LAUNCHED — the first TU-packed wave: build_wave_atlas.py now packs by (binary, home .c) — the real gate_lane group key — giving 60 drafts / 3,508 ins in ONE gate group (vs wave D's 42 drafts / 23 groups). Target ov_SC02_011 jr_8017AE2C, avg 48 ins (vs the card lanes' 12–42), 70 head-crack + 17 redraft + 4 seeded + 2 integration + 2 len-vein + 1 family-sweep; 32 sonnet / 28 haiku. This is the throughput experiment: same gate cost as ~2 wave-D groups for 60 functions of larger mass. 6,981 candidates remain in the atlas's agent-draftable levers (main excluded).

• 2026-08-15 — WAVE F RESULT: the TU-packing thesis is CONFIRMED, and the fresh-crack lane works. 60 atlas mass cards (no proven seed to edit — agents decompile from the .s) → 55/60 = 91% standalone, 3,203 of 3,508 instructions, in ONE gate group. Wave D needed 23 whole-binary rebuilds for 42 drafts; wave F needs 1 for 60. Per-card mass is ~3× the card lanes'. This is the wave shape for the rest of the campaign — build_wave_atlas.py --max-bins 1..6, 60–96 cards.

  • NEW TOOL DEFECT (logged, not yet fixed): aprop_symfix CRASHES on non-hex symbol names. deltas[int(new[-8:],16) - int(old[-8:],16)] assumes every symbol is func_XXXXXXXX/D_XXXXXXXX; a draft calling PsyQ Square0 raises ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 16: 'Square0' and takes the whole audit down. This will recur on every PsyQ-calling draft. Fix wanted: treat a stale pair whose names are not hex-suffixed as a direct 1:1 rename (no delta), and never let one unparseable pair abort the batch (R32: a crash is not a coverage answer). Workaround used: gate the 53 clean drafts, hold the 2 genuine STALE for a hand rename.
  • Grinder ran concurrently with drafting (free CPU, no tree writes during permute) on the close≤6 seeds: 3 ILS cycles each on the md_MAIN_* band, 0 banked, all parked at best-1 — plus it re-surfaced the Phase-22 split-file blindness (func_800CB270: no .s under md_MAIN_027 — skip). Stopped via the STOP sentinel to hand the tree to the wave-F gate (single-writer discipline; the gate is chained to start on grinder release).

• 2026-08-15 — Wave G: 36/36 drafted (100%), 32 banked, fleet 95.3→95.4%. Two TU-packed waves now confirm the shape. aprop_symfix non-hex fix landed (commit:2330): a curated PsyQ name (Square0) made int(name[-8:],16) raise and abort a 55-draft audit after the renames had already succeeded; now counted as a named-1:1 rename and the batch survives. Verified on the literal incident values (old aborts, new completes + still buckets the hex pair by its 0x484c delta); honest caveat — the live slates could not re-trigger the path because those drafts are banked, so the changed expression was exercised directly.

  • Standing pattern worth keeping in the prompt: agents reconstruct CODE reliably (91–100% standalone) but guess PsyQ symbol NAMES unreliably (wave F: S80131E00→Square0, Mat32_…→RotMatrixY; wave G: SRM_…/STM_…→RotTransSV, Blk20_…→RotMatrixY). The deterministic symfix audit — not the model, and not match_one (which masks relocations and is BLIND to a wrong callee name) — is what catches this every time. Consider adding "if the target's .s calls a PsyQ symbol, use that exact name" to the wave LAWS.

• 2026-08-15 — aprop_symfix FALSE-POSITIVE class found (R39), and it cost real banks — my error, not the tool's alone. I withheld 3 wave-G drafts from the gate because symfix reported them STALE/AMBIGUOUS. On inspection all 3 already used the correct PsyQ names (RotMatrixY, RotTransSV); what symfix flagged as "draft-only symbols" were local identifiers — a typedef (Mtx8_8017DE10_8017E710), inline-asm macro names (SRM_80186334/STM_80186334), and local struct typedefs (Blk20_…/Vec32_…). Gated unchanged: 3/3 banked (wave G → 35/36). Two defects behind it: (a) the classifier counts local typedef/macro names as symbol references; (b) its draft-symbol extraction misses some extern declaration forms, so a name the draft does declare (RotMatrixY, line 8) still shows as asm-only.

  • OPERATING RULE (adopt now): symfix flags are ADVISORY; the whole-binary gate is the arbiter. Never withhold a standalone-MATCH draft from the gate on a symfix flag alone — gate it and let the bytes decide. R39's own wording applies to me here: a refusal check that silently discards good work is worse than one that lets a few failures through. (Law 1b in the wave prompt remains correct as prevention — the wave-F cases were genuinely wrong names.)

Blockers

• 🔴 CORRECTION (2026-08-15, R14/R35/P9 — I got this WRONG earlier tonight and reported it with confidence). The "main is blocked on a LINK-RESOLUTION defect" conclusion below is REFUTED. It is a stale-artifact / missing-extract condition in the GATE'S BUILD PATH — the R22 corollary this project already documented at Phase 20 — not a linker bug and not anything to do with the drafts.
  • The control that killed it: with src/ fully reverted and NO draft at all, make build BINARY=main still produced the "broken" c4546248 and the identical 2-byte diff. A defect that reproduces with zero drafts is not caused by drafts.
  • The fix, byte-proven both ways: make extract BINARY=main && make build BINARY=main → 143dbb89… BYTE-IDENTICAL, reproduced twice. make build alone → c4546248 + the 2-byte jal diff, deterministically.
  • Why main and not overlays: main's extract runs the EXE-only psyq_integrate + ld_interleave steps (the ifeq ($(BINARY),main) Makefile blocks) which rewrite the linker script. gate_stage/harvest_verify build without re-extracting, so main gates against a stale .ld — exactly the "a reverted config needs a re-extract, not just a rebuild" corollary. Overlays have no such step, so they are unaffected (and every overlay bank tonight is R22-verified from a genuinely clean tree).
  • What this means: main is very likely NOT blocked at all. Its 79,510 weighted ins @ 0.5% are gated behind a TOOLING gap in the main gate path, not a compiler or linker wall. Next step (do this first): teach the main path to re-extract (or re-run psyq_integrate) before the gate build — then re-gate the 4 preserved drafts in .run/wave_p31e/main/ (2 of which reference no PsyQ symbol at all). The earlier "archive-member selection" evidence (the broken map gaining ~20 PsyQ symbols + firstfile at 0x80062248) is a downstream symptom of the stale .ld, not the cause.
  • The false-lead ledger, kept honestly: I built a 3-hypothesis theory on a measurement whose instrument I had not controlled, and only the null-draft control exposed it. Same lesson as the corpus.stubs() misread and the symfix withholding earlier tonight — three instrument errors in one session, all mine.
• (superseded, kept for the trail) main is blocked on a LINK-RESOLUTION defect — see the 2-byte jal retarget above. Needs its own lane before any main wave is worth running. Overlay/md lanes are unaffected and continue to bank.
  • NARROWED 2026-08-15 (a specific, testable lead). The call site is asm/nonmatchings/libmcrd1/func_80060D9C.s +0xD8, and it references the callee BY NAME: jal func_80061FA8. Original encodes 0x80061FA8; our build with one extra C function encodes 0x80062248. The delta is exactly 0x2A0, which the map shows is precisely the .text SIZE of build/src/800c2.o — the object whose .text starts at 0x80061FA8 (map line 3712: .text 0x80061fa8 0x2a0 build/src/800c2.o, with func_80061FA8 and func_80061FA8.NON_MATCHING both bound there, and func_80062144 inside it). So the name func_80061FA8 resolved to the END of that object instead of its start — i.e. one object's length later, landing on the next section's first symbol (firstfile, build/psyq/apicard/A66.o). Hypotheses to test, in order: (1) the duplicate func_80061FA8 / func_80061FA8.NON_MATCHING pair — a second definition winning under a changed link order; (2) 800c2.o being dropped/reordered when a new undefined ref appears in src/800.o, so the name binds to the following object; (3) an undefined_syms_auto.txt / symbols.us.txt absolute (firstfile2 = 0x80062248) shadowing the object-provided symbol. Everything needed to test is in build/us/SLUS_007.26.map + .run/wave_p31e/main/*.c (4 preserved main drafts).

🛑 (superseded by S53) SESSION CHECKPOINT — S52 FINAL (2026-08-15/16)

Tree CLEAN at commit:2415. No process running. R22 verified 213/213 from a clean tree after the last bank.

Banked this session: 131

Wave O 46 main + 4 ov · re-gate probe 1 · wave P 32 main + 8 md · wave Q 40 main. main 175 → 293 matched · stubs 1,881 → 1,763. Fleet 213/213 byte-identical, 0 NON_MATCHING.

Measured wave economics — the numbers to plan with

wave	carded	drafted	BANKED	yield
O	6,266 ins	96%	5,166	82%
P	6,589 ins	97%	4,501	68%
Q	6,249 ins	58% (stopped early) + repair	~3,000	~48%

~4,800 banked ins/wave when a wave runs to completion (≈75% of carded mass) — NOT 6,000. I quoted the draft rate for most of the session and that overstated it. Still ~5× the old card lanes; ~87 waves for the 417k-ins agent-draftable pool.

THE FOUR RESULTS THAT OUTLIVE THE COUNT

1. UNKNOWN is not a difficulty label — it means the atlas could not name a lever. A 22-card R37 probe drafted it like any other lane ⇒ ~138k ins (a quarter of all open instructions) reclassified as ordinary wave fuel. Agent-draftable pool: 9,224 fns / 417,325 ins = 70%.
2. Matching is solved at this scale; INTEGRATION is the entire cost. 96–97% draft rates with zero symbol errors, then ~14 clean rebuilds to bank them. Every failure was declaration plumbing.
3. Reconcile BEFORE the first gate (§176h.C2). Of 18 parked drafts still verifying MATCH, only 1 survived the conflict check after their wave banked, versus 5 before. Post-bank recovery banked 0. Budget reconciliation into the wave.
4. §177 — the epilogue return-delay slot is decided by the SAVED-REGISTER SET, not scheduling (mips.c:5376 mips_epilogue_delay_slots). Eleven functions sat 1–3 instructions from banked, filed by every agent as an intrinsic wall. ~600 ins unblocked by forty lines of compiler source.

Tooling built this session (all committed, all NC'd)

NEW reloc_identity.py (symbol identity — the oracle match_one structurally cannot be) · NEW pregate_check.py (validates a slate in 0.7s vs a 5-min rebuild) · NEW reconcile_slate.py (drives a slate to 0-dropped; auto-reverts any repair that moves a byte) · NEW fragment_check.py (the enclosing-function trap: a draft that SUBSUMES another symbol, or that REDEFINES another stub's symbol in asm — the second cost a 3-hour bisect) · NEW bisect_slate.py (null control FIRST, per-step logging, true binary search — found the culprit in 7 steps / 176s where gate_main's built-in bisect ran 3 hours and named nothing) · build_wave_atlas --target-ins/--only-bins/--rank mass + 2 selector bugs · gate_lane CRASH≠empty · gate_main ×8 defects.

Cookbook banked: 543 → 564 sections

§176d–k (TU-seeded conflicts · symbol identity computable offline + its 5% null · declaration FORM as a matching lever · the 6k-ins doctrine + 5-step pre-gate protocol · the batch-substitution hazard map incl. C2 reconcile-before-gating · what a static pre-gate can/cannot prove · the cost of stopping a wave + the measured repair-pass yield · two selector bugs) · §177 epilogue delay slot ← saved-register set · §178 six levers from the wave-P journals (the $0-add opaque copy vs make_regs_eqv; return-const as a priority-1 hard-reg set; birthing_insn_p single-set rule; narrow-type copy elision; the zero-offset alias hole; MEM_IN_STRUCT_P asymmetry) — leads with "REGALLOC-PERM is this project's most over-diagnosed class" · §179 eight more, harvested by 12 readers over 172 journal findings (loop-walked pointer parameter → giv; the maspsx transcription checklist; no-epilogue functions; gte_stflg clobber; struct-assignment block copy; pinning disables strength reduction; a pin creating a combine LOG_LINK; mid-body .global fragment slicing).

NEXT SESSION — in order

1. Wave R the new way. build_wave_atlas --target-ins 6500 --min-ins 60 --max-ins 200 --rank mass, then iterate reconcile_slate --apply → fragment_check → pregate_check → gate_main dry-run until N -> N compatible, 0 dropped BEFORE the first rebuild. That sequence is the whole difference between 68% and ~95% yield, and every tool in it now exists. Use bisect_slate.py, never gate_main --apply without --no-bisect.
2. Apply §177 to the eleven epilogue near-misses (800c/800c3, closeness 1–3, ~600 ins). Pure lever application, no drafting: change what is live across the call, re-verify, gate.
3. 4 immovable-TU-declaration drafts (func_8002D034, func_8001ABBC, …) need their own pass: edit the declaration in src/800.c, ONE clean rebuild, R22. They cannot ride a slate because gate_main reverts src/ before every build.
4. Grinder fuel: func_80015F04 at closeness 2 with a fully-derived sched1/sched2 LUID model and three seeds in .run/p31p_15F04/; plus wave-Q leftovers in .run/wave_p31q/main/.

Watch-fors (all bit this session)

gate_main's built-in bisect is near-linear and silent — use bisect_slate.py. · A wave stopped mid-flight loses its in-flight tail; a repair-only pass recovers ~⅓ of it (12/39, 579 ins), but resuming the workflow re-runs unfinished agents from scratch at full cost. · pgrep -f self-matches its own shell wrapper — use the [g]ate_main bracket trick. · Closeness must be COUNTED, not read off the first differing index. · A clean pregate_check is a licence to build, not a prediction of success: link errors and byte mismatches are outside what any text check can see.

🛑 (superseded) SESSION CHECKPOINT — S52 mid-day

Tree CLEAN at commit:2407. R22 verified 213/213 from a fully clean tree after the last bank. Nothing owed, nothing in flight.

Banked: 91 functions

46 main + 4 ov (wave O) · 1 (re-gate probe) · 32 main + 8 md (wave P). main 175 → 253 matched · stubs 1,881 → 1,803. Fleet 213/213 byte-identical, 0 NON_MATCHING.

The two waves, measured honestly

wave	cards / ins	drafted (my re-verify)	symbol errors	BANKED ins	yield
O	49 / 6,266	47/49 (96%)	0	5,166	82%
P	60 / 6,589	58/60 (97%)	0	4,501	68%

The number to plan with is ~4,800 BANKED ins/wave (75% of carded mass), not 6,000 — I quoted the draft rate for most of the session and that overstated it. Still ~5× the card lanes' ~1,400. Revised projection: ~87 waves for the 417k agent-draftable pool, not 69.

THE THREE RESULTS THAT OUTLIVE THE COUNT

1. UNKNOWN is not a difficulty label — it means the atlas could not name a lever. A 22-card R37 probe drafted it like any other lane ⇒ ~138k ins (a quarter of everything open) reclassified as ordinary wave fuel. Agent-draftable pool is now 9,224 fns / 417,325 ins = 70% of all open instructions.
2. Matching is solved at this scale; INTEGRATION is the whole cost. 96–97% draft rates and zero symbol errors across two waves, then ~14 clean rebuilds to bank them. Every failure was declaration plumbing — N standalone drafts having to agree with each other and with a TU none of them can see.
3. Reconcile BEFORE the first gate (§176h.C2). Measured: 18 parked drafts still MATCH, but only 1 survived the conflict check after their wave banked (vs 5 before). A banked draft's declarations become the TU's, so a sibling clash becomes a file clash, which is stricter. The post-bank recovery pass banked 0 — this law cost real work to learn.

Tooling built/fixed (all committed, all NC'd)

NEW tools/reloc_identity.py (symbol identity, the oracle match_one structurally cannot be) · NEW tools/pregate_check.py (validates a slate in 0.7s instead of a 5-min rebuild) · build_wave_atlas --target-ins/--only-bins + glob-derived taken-set · gate_lane CRASH≠empty · gate_main ×8: TU-seeded + per-file conflicts, definition-aware, trailing-comment-blind regexes (×2), typedef alias normalization, address-order walk, build errors surfaced instead of bisected, body+position-aware typedef handling.

Cookbook banked

§176d TU-seeded conflicts + callee function-pointer cast · §176e symbol identity is computable offline (+ its honest 5% null) · §176f declaration FORM is a matching lever · §176g the 6k-ins doctrine + 5-step pre-gate protocol · §176h the batch-substitution hazard map (7 under-reporting holes, the 3 wrong typedef strategies, the spelled-name limit, C2 reconcile-before-gating).

NEXT SESSION — in order

1. Wave Q the NEW way: build with --target-ins 6500 --min-ins 60 --max-ins 200 --max-bins 4, then iterate pregate_check + gate_main dry-run to N -> N compatible, 0 dropped BEFORE the first rebuild. That is the whole difference between 68% and ~95% yield.
2. The 4 immovable-TU-declaration drafts (func_8002D034, func_8001ABBC, …) need their own pass: edit the declarations in src/800.c, ONE clean rebuild, R22.
3. 5 genuine NEARs → grinder. func_80015F04 is at closeness 2 with a fully-derived sched1/sched2 LUID model (9/9 probes predicted) and three seed candidates in .run/p31p_15F04/.
4. Latent, unfixed: conflict detection compares spelled type NAMES; comparing struct bodies (the auto-reconciler already does this) is the real fix.

🛑 (superseded) checkpoint — S52 mid-session

State at checkpoint: tree CLEAN at commit:2402 + wave-O bank commit. R22 verified 213/213 from a fully clean tree after wave O. Nothing owed.

What S52 banked

51 functions — 46 main (ONE clean rebuild, 143dbb89 byte-identical) + 4 overlay (ov_SC04_011) + 1 from the re-gate probe. main 175 → 221 matched, stubs 1,881 → 1,835.

THE TWO RESULTS THAT MATTER MORE THAN THE COUNT

1. 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's 22-card R37 probe drafted it like any other lane ⇒ ~138k ins (a quarter of everything open) reclassified as ordinary wave fuel. With UNKNOWN in, 9,224 fns / 417,325 ins = 70% of all open instructions are agent-draftable.
2. THE 6k-INS WAVE DOCTRINE (adopted by Drew). A wave is sized by INSTRUCTION MASS, not cards — see the doctrine section above for the recipe and the pre-gate protocol. Draft rate barely decays with size (M 98% @51 ins · N 92% @65 · O 96% @128), so mass is nearly free. Projection: ~69 waves, mass band first (27 waves / 164k ins), vs ~440 under the card lanes.

IN FLIGHT AT CHECKPOINT

Wave P (wf_faa2b5e5-a80, 60 cards / 6,589 ins, 2 gate groups: main ×51 + md_SC07_004 ×9) — hit the weekly limit at 18/60 drafted, then RESUMED (w8xrn5y3i). Cached agents replay; the 42 failures re-run. On completion: run the 5-step pre-gate protocol, then gate_main --apply for the main half and gate_lane for md_SC07_004.

• The 18 already-drafted are all MATCH-claimed; my independent re-verify is still OWED (the classifier rate-limited Bash mid-check). Do it before gating.

Tooling fixed this session (all committed, all NC'd)

reloc_identity.py (NEW — the symbol-identity oracle match_one structurally cannot be, §176e) · build_wave_atlas (--target-ins, --only-bins, glob-derived taken-set, refuted main-exclusion default) · gate_lane (CRASH ≠ empty result) · gate_main ×4 (TU-seeded + per-file conflict table · typedef walk in ADDRESS order · build errors surfaced instead of silently bisected · short≡s16 alias normalization).

Cookbook banked this session

§176d TU-seeded conflicts + the callee function-pointer cast · §176e symbol identity is computable offline (+ the honest null: it does NOT rescue stored drafts, 5%) · §176f the declaration FORM is a matching lever · §176g the 6k-ins doctrine + the 5-step pre-gate protocol.

Known-open items

1. func_8002D034 — verified MATCH but needs src/800.c's D_800A4E74 decl changed u16→s16; gate_main reverts src/ before building, so it cannot ride a slate. Recover as its own commit + verifying rebuild.
2. func_80016224 — verified MATCH but requires volatile D_800B9A02, which is fatal to two other drafts. Near-fuel until the TU's form settles.
3. 6 of the 10 ov_SC04_011 wave-O drafts failed the gate on TU plumbing (that overlay's own decl landscape).
4. The AGREE re-gate lane is CLOSED (measured 5% ≈ the A10 law). Do not reopen it.

🛑 (superseded) CHECKPOINT — OVERNIGHT CAMPAIGN CLOSED 2026-08-15 (morning)

Cron be8fb48c (23-min overnight heartbeat) is CANCELLED. No wave will fire on its own. Nothing is in flight at handoff.

What this session did (waves C–N)

~448+ banked · stubs 12,059 → 11,549 · fleet 95.4% instr · 213/213 byte-identical after every single batch · 0 NON_MATCHING · main 0 → 175 matched. Draft rates 91–100% across twelve waves, overwhelmingly haiku/sonnet writing byte-exact C from raw MIPS with no reference body. Four perfect sweeps (36/36, 44/44, 44/44, 44/44).

The three things that actually changed the campaign

1. MAIN IS OPEN — and was never hard. It sat at 0.5% for the whole project, written up as the largest/hardest remaining mass. The blocker was that gate_lane/gate_stage build INCREMENTALLY while main's make extract runs the EXE-only psyq_integrate/ld_interleave steps that REWRITE the .ld → false diff (R22's own rationale). Four byte-correct drafts were rejected; I diagnosed a "linker defect" and built 3 hypotheses on it. A null-draft control killed it (the defect reproduced with ZERO drafts substituted). Use tools/gate_main.py <slate> --apply: substitute batch → extract → build → SHA; ONE clean rebuild verifies a WHOLE batch (40+ per rebuild). ~913 main stubs remain and they draft at 98%.
2. GATE-GROUP PACKING is the throughput lever. Gate cost scales with (binary, TU) groups, not drafts — each group is a whole-binary rebuild. Wave D: 42 drafts / 23 groups. Waves F–N: 40–56 drafts / 1 group. tools/build_wave_atlas.py packs by TU and ranks by instruction mass; --min-ins 40 targets the band the public instr-weighted metric tracks (wave M held 98% at avg 51 ins; wave N 92% at avg 65).
3. match_one VERIFIES SHAPE, NOT SYMBOL IDENTITY. It masks jal/HI16/LO16, so a draft calling the wrong function or storing to the wrong global reports a clean MATCH (wave K: func_8002A234 had two globals swapped — 5 gate attempts). Only the whole-binary gate catches it. Now law 1c in the wave prompt.

Tooling built/fixed this session (all committed, all NC'd)

tools/gate_main.py (NEW — batch clean-rebuild gate for main; in-TU decl-conflict resolution on TYPE SIGNATURES ONLY; duplicate-typedef stripping; compile-error culprit naming instead of bisection; rm-output+returncode check after it once reported a FALSE PASS off a stale binary) · tools/build_wave_atlas.py (NEW — TU-packed, mass-ranked selection; main excluded by default) · tools/build_wave.py (NEW — adapt/weak pools) · gate_lane home-TU resolution derived from corpus (was blind to main) · aprop_symfix survives curated PsyQ names · cookbook §174 law 1b/1c, §175 (caller-saved pins can DELETE an instruction across a call).

Idioms banked before this checkpoint (Drew's rule, 2026-08-15 — memory bank-idioms-before-checkpoint)

Everything learned this session is in docs/matching-cookbook.md, not just in commit text.

• §174 Law 1b/1c, Law 4 — PsyQ symbol names; match_one verifies SHAPE not SYMBOL IDENTITY; the DEF-side prototype constraint.
• §175 — a pin to a CALLER-SAVED register can silently DELETE an instruction when the value's live range crosses a jal.
• §176a/b/c (mine, process-level) — the verification-layer laws (what each check can and cannot prove); batch-gating mechanics (gate cost scales with (binary,TU) groups; batched drafts must agree with each other; compile errors name their own culprit); main cannot be gated incrementally.
• §176 A–F (agent-discovered, mined from all 14 wave journals by a 15-agent workflow; 26 novel of 81, each cross-checked against the existing cookbook first):
  • A — statement order around a call is the FIRST check for any schedule/delay-slot/±1 residual. Two functions that first-pass agents filed as "irreducible tie-break / permuter fuel" went to MATCH by moving ONE statement above a call.
  • B — a small REGALLOC-PERM is usually not allocation (narrow-symbol aliasing; pin the interloper, not the contested value).
  • C — 🔴 WALL REFUTATION, source-verified by me: gcc-2.7.2 sched.c:1704 tests call_used_regs[i] where every neighbouring line uses regno + i, so for a 1-word register it always tests $zero (call-used on MIPS) ⇒ every hard-reg SET in a block gets a REG_DEP_ANTI on the last call, while the pseudo arm is guarded by reg_n_calls_crossed. A PIN CANNOT SCHEDULE AROUND A CALL — sometimes the fix is to UNPIN. Refutes the universality of sched.md S11 step 1 and the "always try pins" reflex.
  • D/E/F — CSE levers in reverse, two cc1-probed spellings, and four residual verdicts that were lying.
  • The section ends with an explicit "What is NOT banked here" listing 7 mined items judged too thin — including two whose functions are still INCLUDE_ASM (so the lever is unverifiable) and one whose narrative contradicts the banked C. Nothing was silently dropped.

Open work, in priority order

1. Run main waves — highest value, ~913 stubs, 98% draft, gate_main handles it.
2. gate_lane swallows gate_stage stderr — reports an unhandled crash as 0 banked / 0 near / 0 failed, indistinguishable from an honest empty result (cost 2 cycles). Make it surface stderr / distinguish CRASH from NOTHING-BANKED.
3. Recover ~10 conflict-dropped main drafts (waves J/K/L) — verified-correct, need cast-at-use.
4. Grinder queue has fresh seeds incl. close=1 DELAY-SLOT (func_80183578) and count-exact func_8017DAEC.

The methodological lesson (worth more than the count)

Every serious stall traced to an instrument trusted without a control, never to gcc: the main "linker defect"; corpus.stubs() read as names when it returns addr→Stub; 3 good drafts withheld on an ADVISORY symfix flag; gate_lane crash-as-zero; my conflict checker too strict then too coarse; my verifier passing without building. Before believing a measurement, run the control that would make it fail — a null input, a known-answer population, or an independent oracle. The counterweight: the safety architecture held every time. R22 caught the false pass, corpus refused to guess, and the byte-gate never accepted a wrong match.

(superseded) mid-flight checkpoint

Phase 31 CONTINUES. Overnight campaign running under Drew's "waves and banking all night long" directive (Opus 5, ultracode, 23-min cron heartbeat be8fb48c as the loop's safety net).

This session's arc: resume R22 213/213 → atlas regen (5,144 groups / 11,994 open) → wave-C probe (3 tell) → wave C (35: 11 tell + 24 weak) 32 banked → main probe (6) 0 banked, blocker diagnosed → wave D (48 adapt) 47/48 standalone, gating now. Session banked ≈ 59+ (18 mechanical/probe + 32 wave C + wave D in flight).

THE TWO STRATEGIC FINDINGS (read these first on resume):

1. Reach is spent: ~1.25×. 32 wave-C exemplars → only 8 had a sharer, ×2 each. The ×134 era ended in P25/29/30. Fleet-% now moves ~1:1 with functions banked ⇒ throughput is the lever, and the throughput bottleneck is the GATE, whose cost scales with (binary,TU) groups, not drafts (wave C: 35 drafts/27 groups; wave D: 42/23). tools/build_wave_atlas.py (NEW) concentrates a wave into few binaries (96 drafts → 1 group) and weights by instruction mass — use it for every future wave; the adapt/weak card piles are the 12–42-ins tail (~0.011pp fleet per 48-card wave ≈ 440 waves to finish).
2. main is BLOCKED on a LINK defect, not on matching (see Blockers). --exclude-bins main is the default in build_wave_atlas.py.

🔑 THE NIGHT'S HEADLINE — MAIN IS OPEN (2026-08-15). main (79,510 weighted ins, was 0.5%) was NOT blocked by a linker defect; that was my misdiagnosis off an uncontrolled measurement. It needs a CLEAN REBUILD to gate (make clean && make extract BINARY=main && make build BINARY=main), because main's extract runs the EXE-only psyq_integrate/ld_interleave steps that rewrite the .ld — exactly the trap R22's own rationale describes. 4 main functions are banked (byte-identical, full clean build), drafted by the ordinary mass lane. NEXT SESSION'S HIGHEST-VALUE TASK: give the main gate path a clean-rebuild mode (one clean build verifies a whole BATCH — that is how 4 banked at once), then run main waves as ordinary campaign fuel. main has ~1,030 open stubs.

📐 THE ONE METHODOLOGICAL LESSON OF THE NIGHT (worth more than the function count). Every serious stall traced to an instrument I trusted without controlling, never to gcc:

• "main is link-blocked" → refuted by a null-draft control (the defect reproduced with ZERO drafts substituted). I had already written a 3-hypothesis linker theory on top of it.
• corpus.stubs() read as names when it returns addr→Stub → nearly reported both card pools exhausted.
• 3 good drafts withheld on an advisory symfix flag → all 3 banked unchanged when gated.
• gate_lane reporting an unhandled crash as "0 banked / 0 near / 0 failed" → indistinguishable from an honest empty result; cost 2 cycles.
• gate_main.typesig() too strict (parameter names) then too coarse (dropped []) → discarded good work, then passed a real conflict that R22 caught. The rule that would have prevented all five: before believing a measurement, run the control that would make it fail. A null input, a known-answer population, or an independent oracle. R35 says fix the instrument first; the sharper form is confirm the instrument can even answer, and that it answers correctly on a case whose answer you already know.

⚠️ TOOLING DEBT FOUND TONIGHT (fix before the next long run):

1. gate_lane swallows gate_stage's stderr — it reported banked 0, near 0, failed 0 twice while gate_stage was actually raising corpus.CorpusError. An unreported crash is indistinguishable from an honest empty result. It must surface stderr and distinguish CRASH from NOTHING-BANKED. (Running gate_stage directly gave the precise cause instantly.)
2. aprop_symfix false-positives on LOCAL identifiers (typedefs, inline-asm macro names) and its draft-symbol extraction misses some extern forms → it reported STALE/AMBIGUOUS for 3 drafts that were already correct. Symfix is ADVISORY; the gate is the arbiter — never withhold a standalone-MATCH draft on a flag alone.
3. Never make clean mid-campaign without immediately re-running make extract-all — it wipes every binary's asm/ and every downstream tool then fails in confusing ways (cost 2 gate cycles tonight).

📊 OVERNIGHT RESULT (2026-08-15, waves C–M). ~408 banked · stubs 12,059 → 11,589 · fleet 95.4% instr · 213/213 byte-identical after every batch · main 0 → 175 matched (913 stubs left). Wave draft rates 91–100% across ten waves, mostly haiku, writing byte-exact C from raw MIPS with no reference body. Four perfect sweeps (36/36, 44/44, 44/44, 44/44).

🔧 THE MAIN LANE — HOW TO RUN IT (this is the night's unlock). main was 0.5% and written up as the hardest remaining mass; it was never hard, it was never gated correctly. Use tools/gate_main.py <slate.json> --apply: substitute the batch → make extract BINARY=main → make build → SHA. ONE clean rebuild verifies the WHOLE batch (42–43 banked per rebuild). It reports in-TU declaration conflicts and, on a compile error, names the culprit instead of bisecting. Do NOT gate main through gate_lane/gate_stage — they build incrementally and main's extract rewrites the .ld, producing a false diff (R22's own rationale).

• Known next improvement (mechanical, recurring): gate_main should strip DUPLICATE TYPEDEFS on substitution the way harvest_verify already does. src/800.c now carries local typedefs (e.g. SVECTOR) from previously banked functions, so any later draft defining its own collides and costs a draft per wave.
• The 5+3+2 conflict-dropped main drafts across waves J/K/L are verified-correct and recoverable with cast-at-use (adopt the other declaration verbatim, adapt at the use site).

RESUME STEPS:

1. pgrep -f tools/gate_lane — never run two gates, and never run build_wave*.py during one (R35 guard: corpus.stubs() misreports substituted drafts).
2. Gate the late-repaired wave-D drafts: .run/wave_p31d_late_slate.json (5 verified MATCH, rescued by the repair stage after the main slate was built).
3. R22 (make clean && make extract-all && make check-all → 213/213), then commit (task + this log together).
4. Next wave: .venv/bin/python tools/build_wave_atlas.py .run/wave_p31f_cards.json 96 --max-bins 8 → convert to args ({wavedir,cards_file,cards}) → Workflow scratchpad/p31_wave.js. Lanes: mass (atlas), adapt/weak (tools/build_wave.py <pool>; adapt 569 + weak 890 candidates remain, both verified live after the predicate fix).
5. Grinder queue has 3 fresh high-value seeds incl. func_80183578 close=1 DELAY-SLOT (§60a precedent: a close=1 delay-slot banked in ~6 min) and func_8017DAEC count-exact 113=113.

Watch-fors (all bit tonight): agent self-reports run OPTIMISTIC — always re-verify with match_one yourself, then the gate (wave C claimed 35/35→32 banked; main probe claimed 6/6→I measured 4/6→0 banked). An agent once wrote its body straight into src/boot.c (reverted; prompt hardened) — a dirty tree ABORTS the shared gate. pgrep -f self-matches its own shell wrapper (invoke without shell=True). corpus.stubs() is addr→Stub, not names.

(superseded) checkpoint — 2026-08-14 pre-overnight

Phase 31 CONTINUES (campaign-to-ceiling; do NOT close). Session totals: 65 banked (17 mechanical @$0 + wave A 12+1prop @~117k tok/bank + wave B 35/37 gated, 95% conversion @~88k tok/bank — the decl-matching lesson nearly eliminated integration failures). Stubs ≈ 11,995 (from 12,059). All banks byte-gated + committed; wave banks propagated where sharers existed.

RESUME STEPS (fresh session, after the standard load order):

1. git log --oneline -20 to see the wave-B bank commits; run R22 (make clean && make extract-all && make check-all → expect 213/213) — it was NOT run after wave B (context ran out; the per-bank gates each verified their own binary, but the standing clean-fleet proof is owed FIRST).
2. make atlas (regenerates maps + atlas post-banks, ~15 min, $0).
3. Wave C is STAGED, not launched: .run/wave_p31c_cards.json (14 §172b tell-cards [sonnet] + 24 weak-seed haiku cards — measures the two untested agent lanes). Launch via the persisted workflow script workflows/scripts/p31-adapt-wave-a-wf_2fbef223-859.js pattern (args = the cards; NOTE the tell/weak cards have different fields than adapt cards — adapt the prompt per lane or write a v2 script). Needs /effort ultracode (R27).
4. Adapt pile remains ~630 SMALL-EDIT cards — the proven 73-95% lane; wave D+ = next 48 by the same selection (exclude banked; see .run/wave_p31{a,b}_cards.json for taken).
5. Grinder queue armed: 59 warmstart + 6 wave-A NEARs + 8 wave-B NEARs (4 at close ≤3). Relaunch: GATE_PHASE=phase-31 .venv/bin/python tools/grinder.py --once --batch 15 … (single-writer: never while a gate runs).
6. Ledger discipline: velocity row per wave (the table above); distill lessons per R16/R30; close the phase ONLY on measured multi-session yield decay (plan file §Leg-C).

Watch-fors: gate_lane aborts on dirty src/config (clean first); symfix-first before every gate (§173); the safety-classifier can rate-limit under 48-agent bursts (harmless — retry).

(superseded) previous checkpoint (end of build arc)

T0–T9 ALL COMPLETE AND COMMITTED (through commit:2181). Phase totals: 17 banked, 0 agent tokens; stubs 12,059 → 12,042; R22 213/213 verified twice (post-T1, post-T6). The machine: the Atlas (5,139 groups, make atlas), the widened lanes (symfix STALE-DELTA, recover_integration isolation + macro-externs/tu-scope, family_align + len_tells + lenmiss routing), the armed queues (grinder: 59 warmstart records; cards: 954 weak + 192 len + 704 adapt; permuter-49). NEXT = T10+ the campaign loop: L3 grinder running in background (launched at checkpoint time); card/crack WAVES need Drew's /effort ultracode toggle first (R27) — prompt and WAIT. Campaign cadence + close criterion: the plan file §Leg-C. If resuming fresh: read the approved plan + this log; check .run/auto/grinder_heartbeat.json; run make atlas to refresh; continue the loop.