Two-pronged self-documentation pass so reviewers / investors / the
future team can revisit any artifact cold and immediately understand
what it tests, what to expect, and what to do if the numbers shift.
Inline preambles (`core demo`):
Before each demo's results table, print a structured preamble:
- WHAT THIS DEMO TESTS mechanism + corpus shape
- WHAT TO EXPECT IF WORKING concrete pass numbers
- WHAT TO LOOK FOR specific signals on regression
- WHEN TO TWEAK falsifiability + corpus authoring rules
Suppressed under --json so machine-readable output is uncluttered.
Wired into:
core demo phase5 (5-family stratified mechanism-isolation)
core demo phase6 (3-condition head-to-head vs baseline)
core demo all (combined; both preambles + a "what this means"
summary after the combined table)
Per-directory READMEs:
evals/forward_semantic_control/results/README.md
- Inventory of every JSON report with headline metrics
- Per-report interpretation guide ("when to look here")
- Per-case schema reference
- "When something looks wrong" troubleshooting tree
- Cross-links to ADRs, runtime_contracts, findings docs
evals/forward_semantic_control/public/v2_phase5/README.md
- The five failure-mode families, geometric construction, and
expected behaviour per mode
- Case schemas (single-step + chained) with field semantics
- How cases were geometrically mined (phase5_mine.py)
- Authoring rules: add cases, never relax assertions
evals/forward_semantic_control/public/v2_phase6_demo/README.md
- The three conditions with case counts and what each proves
- Why the baseline is in-system (not a transformer LLM) — table
- Case schema with the `condition` field
- Authoring rules: surface specific asymmetry, never relax predicate
evals/forward_semantic_control/public/inner_loop_benign/README.md
- Why this corpus exists (replaces adversarial-by-accident v1/dev)
- The Cl(4,1) signature quirk (23/85 tokens with negative
self-cga_inner) and the 0.25 self-score authoring filter
- Expected exhaustion_rate per condition
- How to verify a new case before committing (one-liner snippet)
New contract tests (tests/test_cli_demo.py::TestDemoPreambles + ::TestResultsReadme):
- Phase 6 preamble explains C1/C2/C3 and the in-system baseline rationale
- Phase 5 preamble explains all five families AND that δ is falsifiable
- Preamble suppressed under --json (parseable JSON from byte 0)
- `demo all` runs both preambles + a "what this means" summary
- results/README.md mentions every phase report file
- All three corpus READMEs exist
Tests: 1107 passed, 2 skipped (+8 from preceding baseline).
No mechanism changes — all additions are documentation surface.
Shay