71542e61 fixed only half of H-13 and asserted a premise that is false. This
replaces it, and records why, because the failure mode is the one this arc
exists to catch.
WHAT WAS WRONG. The refcount rested on "seeding and eviction walk the same
source list, so the counts balance." They do not. The call site's arms are
MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE (pipeline.py §10b): a proposal is seeded when SPECULATIVE or
released when COHERENT, never both. So a release never balances a claim the
same proposal made, and a COHERENT proposal ALWAYS releases claims it never
held. Refcounting therefore repaired only the sub-case where both proposals had
been taught speculatively. The ordinary case — an unreviewed `wisdom`, then a
separate correction about `practical wisdom` that passes review on its own turn
— still stripped the marker. Measured against the landed refcount:
`sibling marked? False`.
The first attempt's tests passed because their helpers split tokens themselves,
mirroring a call pattern production no longer used — tests written to the fix
instead of to the defect. That is the same "asserted past the evidence" failure
diagnosed in two external assessments earlier today, committed here one commit
later, and catchable by reading fifteen lines at the call site.
WHAT IS CORRECT. _speculative_subjects maps token -> SET OF CLAIMING SUBJECTS.
A token is evicted exactly when the subject that actually claimed it is
reviewed; discarding an absent claimant is a no-op, so a neighbour's marker
survives. Token derivation moved out of the call site into
_speculative_index_tokens, because ownership is what the call site cannot see —
doing the split out there made every token its own claimant, which was the bug.
Tests rewritten to call the cache exactly as §10b does. The lead pin
(test_coherent_proposal_does_not_unmark_an_unrelated_subject) was confirmed to
FAIL against the refcount design before this landed, so it discriminates rather
than merely passing. 13 pins green; the 8 pre-existing lifecycle pins unchanged.
SUITE MEMBERSHIP, resolved rather than deferred. The file pinning this behavior
sat in NO curated suite, reachable only through `full` — which is why the
regression was invisible (G-7's mechanism, on the pin that would have caught
it). Registered now in BOTH TEST_SUITES["smoke"] and smoke.yml, per the #136
precedent that an unregistered pin runs nowhere. Verified the local/CI delta is
unchanged at exactly ten files (local 24, CI 14, CI-only 0), so this is
compatible with all three R-14 options and settles none of them; PR-4 still
owns the standing ten.
Cleanup as found: three unambiguously dead imports removed from pipeline.py
(hashlib, RatificationOutcome, RatifiedIntent). ruff 4 -> 1; the survivor is a
pre-existing structural E402, left alone.
Ratification note unchanged: this changes served surfaces — markers appear on
turns where they previously vanished. Direction is toward disclosure and it
restores ADR-0021 §Articulation's stated intent rather than extending it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wcw2pnMBwyvmNyQg4uPEt4
The speculative-marker cache seeds a subject AND each >=4-char token split from
it, so two independent proposals can claim the same token ("wisdom" from both
`wisdom` and `practical wisdom`). `_forget_speculative_subject` popped the token
outright on COHERENT promotion — regardless of which proposal had seeded it — so
promoting one proposal stripped the marker from another that was still
unreviewed. Unreviewed material was then served WITHOUT the "(speculative, not
yet reviewed)" prefix: the expensive failure direction, on the surface whose
whole job is telling reviewed knowledge from unreviewed.
_speculative_subjects becomes OrderedDict[str, int] — the value is a reference
count. Seeding increments and refreshes LRU position; promotion decrements and
evicts at zero. Seeding and eviction walk the same source list so counts
balance; where they disagree the count stays positive and the subject keeps its
marker, which is the honest direction to fail. An unmatched release floors at
removal and never goes negative, so it cannot borrow against a later proposal's
claim. The LRU cap survives unchanged as a size valve.
Four new pins in tests/test_speculative_subject_lifecycle.py, ALL FOUR OBSERVED
RED BEFORE GREEN — sibling token evicted, marker lost at the served surface,
repeated teaching cleared by one promotion, and count underflow. The eight
pre-existing lifecycle pins pass unchanged.
Also H-8e — expand_relation_closure's docstring claimed "Cycle: if path would
revisit a node, skip", describing a check the code does not perform. The code
was right: termination is structural (monotone growth over a finite triple set),
and a path-revisit skip would REFUSE SOUND transitive derivations, since a
witness path that revisits a node still proves a true fact. The docstring now
says that, and records that `path` is the witnessing step rather than full
ancestry — extending it would move operator_invocation and therefore trace_hash,
so it is deliberately not done here.
Registers updated: H-13 marked FIXED with the ratification note (this changes
served surfaces toward disclosure, restoring ADR-0021 §Articulation's stated
intent rather than extending it); H-8e marked CORRECTED.
Found while fixing it, recorded not acted on: tests/test_speculative_subject_
lifecycle.py — the file pinning this exact behavior — is in NO curated suite,
reachable only through `full`. G-7's mechanism, caught on the pin that would
have caught the defect. Assignment left to PR-4; adding it to TEST_SUITES
["smoke"] alone would widen N-3's ten-file delta and prejudge R-14.
Pre-existing ruff findings in pipeline.py (3 unused imports, 1 E402) confirmed
present before this change and left alone — module-top, not adjacent to the edit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wcw2pnMBwyvmNyQg4uPEt4
Closes audit Finding 5 (2026-05-20).
Pre-fix ``CognitiveTurnPipeline._speculative_subjects`` was a bare
``set[str]`` that only grew over a session. Two correctness gaps:
* A subject promoted to ``EpistemicStatus.COHERENT`` via the teaching
review loop kept appearing with the "(speculative, not yet
reviewed)" marker forever, contaminating reviewed material on
later probes.
* Long teaching sessions widened the per-turn substring scan in
``_should_mark_speculative`` without bound.
Fix:
* Back the cache with ``OrderedDict[str, None]`` (LRU) capped at
``_MAX_SPECULATIVE_SUBJECTS = 64``.
* Introduce ``_remember_speculative_subject`` (insert / refresh) and
``_forget_speculative_subject`` (evict) helpers; route all
SPECULATIVE inserts through them.
* When a proposal lands as ``EpistemicStatus.COHERENT``, evict the
subject and every long-enough non-stopword token derived from it,
so the marker stops appearing on reviewed material.
Iteration order in ``_should_mark_speculative`` is unchanged (keys
view); lookups remain O(1). No surface change for any case the prior
behavior didn't already mishandle, so byte-identical eval surfaces
stay stable (verified locally against ``core eval cognition`` public /
holdout / dev splits — all unchanged from MEMORY baseline).
Tests (7 new, ``tests/test_speculative_subject_lifecycle.py``):
* storage is an OrderedDict and the cap is 64
* remember normalizes (lower+strip) and drops empty input
* remember refreshes LRU position on re-insert
* cache caps at 64 with insertion-order eviction
* forget is case-insensitive and removes the entry
* forget on a missing / empty subject is a no-op
* ``_should_mark_speculative`` triggers after remember and stops
triggering after forget
Audit findings referenced:
https://github.com/AssetOverflow/core/pull/76 (Finding 5, "Unbounded
``_speculative_subjects``")
Claude