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``")
